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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



TRAMPING THROUGH 

MEXICO, GUATEMALA 

AND HONDURAS 




A street of Puebla, Mexico, and the Soledad Church 



TRAMPING THROUGH 

MEXICO, GUATEMALA 

AND HONDURAS 



Being the Random Notes 
of an Incurable Vagabond 



BY 

HARRY A. FRANCK 

Author of "A Vagabond Journey Around 
the World," "Zone Policeman 

88," ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 

1916 






Copyright, 1916, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, August, 1916 



AUG 19 1916 
©CI.A438120 



IIP 









TO 
THE MEXICAN PEON 

WITH 

SINCKREST WISHES 

FOR HIS 

ULTIMATE EMANCIPATION 



FOREWORD 

This simple story of a journey southward grew up 
of itself. Planning a comprehensive exploration of 
South America, I concluded to reach that continent 
by some less monotonous route than the steamship's 
track ; and herewith is presented the unadorned nar- 
rative of what I saw on the way, — the day-by-day 
experiences in rambling over bad roads and into 
worse lodging-places that infallibly befall all who 
venture afield south of the Rio Grande. The present 
account joins up with that of five months on the 
Canal Zone, already published, clearing the stage for 
a larger forthcoming volume on South America giv- 
ing the concrete results of four unbroken years of 
Latin-American travel. 

Harry A. France. 

New York, May, 1910. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



CHAPTEB 

I INTO THE COOLER SOUTH . 



II TRAMPING THE BYWAYS . h 

III IN A MEXICAN MINE .... 

IV ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA 
V ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 

VI TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY . . 

VII TROPICAL MEXICO 

VIII HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

IX THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 

X THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS . 



PAGE 

. 3 

. 34 

. 63 

. 117 

. 154 

. 194 

. 225 

. 253 

. 284 

. 357 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A street of Puebla, Mexico, and the Soledad Church Frontispiece * 

The first glimpse of Mexico. Looking across the Rio 
Grande at Laredo 5 

A corner of Monterey from my hotel window .... 5 

A peon restaurant in the market-place of San Luis Potosi 11 

A market woman of San Luis Potosi 11 

Some sold potatoes no larger than nuts 18 v 

A policeman and an arriero 18 ' 

The former home, in Dolores Hidalgo, of the Mexican 

"Father of his Country" 28' 

Rancho de Capulin, where I ended the first day of tramp- 
ing in Mexico 28 

View of the city of Guanajuato 37 

Fellow-roadsters in Mexico 48 

Some of the pigeon-holes of Guanajuato's cemetery . .48 

A pulque street-stand and one of its clients 57 

Prisoners washing in the patio of the former " AkSndiga " 57 

Drilling with compressed-air drills in a mine " heading " . 68 * 

As each car passed I snatched a sample of its ore . . 68 

Working a "heading" by hand 73 

Peon miners being searched for stolen ore as they leave 

the mine . 79 

Bricks of gold and silver ready for shipment. Each is 

worth something like $1250 79 

In a natural amphitheater of Guanajuato the American 
miners of the region gather on Sundays for a game of 

baseball 90 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Some of the peons under my charge about to leave the mine 90 * 

The easiest way to carry a knapsack — on a peon's back .. 95 " 

The ore thieves of Peregrina being led away to prison . . 95 

One of Mexico's countless " armies " 101 

Vendors of strawberries at the station of Irapuato . . . 101 

The wall of Guadalajara penitentiary against which pris- 
oners are shot 112 

The liver-shaking stagecoach from Atequisa to Chapala . 112 

Lake Chapala from the estate of Ribero Castellanos . . 121 

The head farmer of the estate under an aged fig-tree . . 121 

A Mexican village 132 

Making glazed floor tiles on a Mexican estate . ... . . 141 

Vast seas of Indian corn stretch to pine-clad hills, while 
around them are guard-shacks at frequent intervals . . 141 

Interior of a Mexican hut at cooking time 152 

Fall plowing near Patzcuaro . 161 

Modern transportation along the ancient highway from 
Tzintzuntzan, the former Tarascan capital . ... >. . .161 

In the church of ancient Tzintzuntzan is a " Descent from 
the Cross" ascribed to Titian . 172 

Indians waiting outside the door of the priest's house in 
Tzintzuntzan 172 

A corner of Morelia, capital of Michoacian, and its an- 
cient aqueduct -: . • ■ . ■ . . M ... . 181 

The spot and hour in which Maximilian was shot, with the 
chapel since erected by Austria 181 

The market of Tlaxcala, the ancient inhabitants of which 
aided Cortez in the conquest of Mexico ....... 192 ' 

A rural of the state of Tlaxcala on guard before a bar- 
racks ; . 192' 

A part of Puebla, looking toward the peak of Orizaba . . 201 

Popocatepetl and the artificial hill of Cholula on which the 
Aztecs had a famous temple, overthrown by Cortez . . 201 

A typical Mexican of the lowlands of Tehuantepec . . . 212 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A typical Mexican boy of the highlands 212 

Looking down on Maltrata as the train begins its descent . 217 ■ 

A residence of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec 217 

On the banks of the Coatzacoalcos, Isthmus of Tehuantepec 223 " 

Women of Tehuantepec in the market-place 234 

On the hillside above Tehuantepec are dwellings partly dug 
out of the cliffs 234 

A rear-view of the remarkable head-dress of the women of 
Tehuantepec, and one of their decorated bowls . . . 239 

A woman of northern Guatemala 239 

A station of the "Pan-American" south of Tehuantepec 245 

An Indian boy of Guatemala on his way home from market 245 

Three " gringoes " on the tramp from the Mexican bound- 
ary to the railway of Guatemala 256 

Inside the race-track at Guatemala City is a relief map 
of the entire country 256 

One of the jungle-hidden ruins of Quiragua" 261 

The last house in Guatemala, near the boundary of Hon- 
duras ■ 261 

A woman shelling corn for my first meal in Honduras . . 267 

A vista of Honduras from a hillside, to which I climbed 
after losing the trail ........... 267 

A resident of Santa Rosa, victim of the hook-worm . . . 278 

The chief monument of the ruins of Copan 278 

I topped a ridge and caught sight at last of Santa Rosa, 
first town of any size in Honduras 287 

Soldiers of Santa Rosa eating in the market-place . . . 287' 

Christmas dinner on the road in Honduras 294- 

Several times I met the families of soldiers tramping 
northward with all their possessions 294 

A fellow-roadster behind one of my cigars S00 

An arriero carrying a bundle of Santa Rosa cigars on his 
own back as he drives his similarly laden animals . .. 300 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The great military force of Esperanza compelled to draw 
up and face my camera 305 

The prisoners in their chains form an interested audience 
across the street 305 v 

Honduras, the Land of Great Depths 311V 

A corner of Tegucigalpa 317 - 

The " West Pointers " of Honduras in their barracks, a 
part of the national palace 317 L 

View of Tegucigalpa from the top of Picacho .... 324 " 

Repairing the highway from Tegucigalpa to the Coast . . 324 

A family of Honduras 327' 

Approaching Sabana Grande, the first night's stop on the 
tramp to the coast 327 

A beef just butchered and hung out in the sun .... 334- 

A dwelling on the hot lands of the Coast, and its scantily 
clad inhabitants 334 i 

Along the Pasoreal River 337 * 

The mozo pauses for a drink on the trail 348" 

One way of transporting merchandise from the coast to 
Tegucigalpa 348 v 

The other way of bringing goods up to the capital . . . 353' 

The garrison -of Amapala 353 

Marooned " gringoes " waiting with what patience possible 
at the " Hotel Morazan," Amapala 359 

Unloading cattle in the harbor of Amapala 359 

The steamer arrives at last that is to carry us south to 
Panama 373 

We lose no time in being rowed out to her 373 

MAP 

The Author's Itinerary Facing page 32 ' 



TRAMPING THROUGH 

MEXICO, GUATEMALA 

AND HONDURAS 



TRAMPING THROUGH 

MEXICO, GUATEMALA 

AND HONDURAS 



CHAPTER I 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 



YOU are really in Mexico before you get there. 
Laredo is a purely — though not pure — 
Mexican town with a slight American tinge. Scores 
of dull-skinned men wander listlessly about trying to 
sell sticks of candy and the like from boards carried 
on their heads. There are not a dozen shops where 
the clerks speak even good pidgin English, most 
signs are in Spanish, the lists of voters on the walls 
are chiefly of Iberian origin, the very county officers 
from sheriff down — or up — are names the aver- 
age American could not pronounce, and the saun- 
terer in the streets may pass hours without hearing 
a word of English. Even the post-office employees 
speak Spanish by preference and I could not do the 
simplest business without resorting to that tongue. 
I am fond of Spanish, but I do not relish being forced 

to use it in my own country. 

3 



4 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

On Laredo's rare breeze rides enough dust to build 
a new world. Every street is inches deep in it, 
everything in town, including the minds of the in- 
habitants, is covered with it. As to heat — " Cin- 
cinnati Slim " put it in a nutshell even as we 
wandered in from the cattleyards where the freight 
train had dropped us ia the small hours : " If ever 
hell gets full this '11 do fine for an annex." 

Luckily my window in the ruin that masqueraded 
as a hotel faced such wind as existed. The only 
person I saw in that institution during twenty-four 
hours there was a little Mexican boy with a hand- 
broom, which he evidently carried as an ornament 
or a sign of office. It seemed a pity not to let 
Mexico have the dust-laden, sweltering place if they 
want it so badly. 

I had not intended to lug into Mexico such a load 
as I did. But it was a Jewish holiday, and the 
pawnshops were closed. As I passed the lodge on 
the north end of the bridge over the languid, brown 
Rio Grande it was a genuine American voice that 
snapped : " Heh ! A nickel ! " 

Just beyond, but thirty-six minutes earlier, the 
Mexican official stopped me with far more courtesy, 
and peered down into the corners of my battered 
" telescope " without disturbing the contents. 

" Monterey ? " he asked. 

" Si, senor." 

" No rev61ver? " he queried suspiciously. 




i 



mm 



The first glimpse of Mexico. Looking across the Rio Grande at 

Laredo 




A corner of Monterey from my hotel window 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 7 

" No, sefior," I answered, keeping the coat on 
my arm unostentatiously over my hip pocket. It 
was n't a revolver ; it was an automatic. 

The man who baedekerized Mexico says Nuevo 
Laredo is not the place to judge that country. I 
was glad to hear it. Its imitation of a. street-car, 
eight feet long, was manned by two tawny children 
without uniforms, nor any great amount of substi- 
tute for them, who smoked cigarettes incessantly as 
we crawled dustily through the baked-mud hamlet 
to the decrepit shed that announced itself the sta- 
tion of the National Railways of Mexico. It was 
closed, of course. I waited an hour or more before 
two officials resplendent in uniforms drifted in to 
take up the waiting where I had left off. But it 
was a real train that pulled in toward three, from 
far-off St. Louis, even if it had hooked on behind 
a second-class car with long wooden benches. 

For an hour we rambled across just such land as 
southern Texas, endless flat sand scattered with 
chaparral, mesquite, and cactus ; nowhere a sign of 
life, but for fences of one or two barb-wires on 
crooked sticks — not even bird life. The wind, 
strong and incessant as at sea, sounded as mournful 
through the thorny mesquite bushes as in our 
Northern winters, even though here it brought relief 
rather than suffering. The sunshine was unbrok- 
enly glorious. 

Benches of stained wood in two-inch strips ran 



8 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

the entire length of our car, made , in Indiana. In 
the center were ten double back-to-back seats of the 
same material. The conductor was American, but 
as in Texas he seemed to have little to do except to 
keep the train moving. The auditor, brakeman, and 
train-boy were Mexicans, in similar uniforms, but 
of thinner physique and more brown of color. The 
former spoke fluent English. The engineer was 
American and the fireman a Negro. 

Far ahead, on either side, hazy high mountains 
appeared, as at sea. By the time we halted at 
Lampazos, fine serrated ranges stood not far dis- 
tant on either hand. From the east came a never- 
ceasing wind, stronger than that of the train, laden 
with a fine sand that crept in everywhere. Mexican 
costumes had appeared at the very edge of the 
border ; now there were even a few police under enor- 
mous hats, with tight trousers and short jackets 
showing a huge revolver at the hip. Toward even- 
ing things grew somewhat greener. A tree six to 
twelve feet high, without branches, or sometimes with 
several trunk-like ones, growing larger from bottom 
to top and ending in a bristling bunch of leaves, 
became common. The mountains on both sides 
showed fantastic peaks and ridges, changing often 
in aspect ; some, thousands of feet high with flat 
tableland tops, others in strange forms the imag- 
ination cou!d animate into all manner of crea- 
tures. 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 9 

A goatherd, wild, tawny, bearded, dressed in sun- 
faded sheepskin, was seen now and then tending his 
flocks of little white goats in the sand and cactus. 
This was said to be the rainy season in northern 
Mexico. What must it be in the dry? 

Toward five the sun set long before sunset, so 
high was the mountain wall on our right. The 
sand-storm had died down, and the sand gave way 
to rocks. The moon, almost full, already smiled 
down upon us over the wall on the left. We con- 
tinued along the plain between the ranges, which 
later receded into the distance, as if retiring for 
the night. Flat, mud-colored, Palestinian adobe 
huts stood here and there in the moonlight among 
patches of a sort of palm bush. 

Monterey proved quite a city. Yet how the ways 
of the Spaniard appeared even here! Close as it 
is to the United States, with many American resi- 
dents and much " americanizado," according to the 
Mexican, the city is in architecture, arrangement, 
customs, just what it would be a hundred miles from 
Madrid; almost every little detail of life is that of 
Spain, with scarcely enough difference to suggest 
another country, to say nothing of another hemi- 
sphere. England brings to her colonies some of her 
home customs, but not an iota of what Spain does 
to the lands she has conquered. The hiding of 
wealth behind a miserable facade is almost as uni- 
versal in Mexico of the twentieth century as in 



10 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Morocco of the fourth. The narrow streets of 
Monterey have totally inadequate sidewalks on 
which two pedestrians pass, if at all, with the rub- 
bing of shoulders. Outwardly the long vista of bare 
house fronts that toe them on either side are dreary 
and poor, every window barred as those of a prison. 
Yet in them sat well-dressed senoritas waiting for 
the lovers who " play the bear " to late hours of the 
night, and over their shoulders the passerby caught 
many a glimpse of richly furnished rooms and 
flowery patios beyond. 

The river Catalina was drier than even the Man- 
zanares, its rocky bed, wide enough to hold the 
upper Connecticut, entirely taken up by mule and 
donkey paths and set with the cloth booths of fruit 
sellers. As one moves south it grows cooler, and 
Monterey, fifteen hundred feet above sea-level, was 
not so weighty in its heat as Laredo and southern 
Texas. But, on the other hand, being surrounded 
on most sides by mountains, it had less breeze, and 
the coatless freedom of Texas was here looked down 
upon. During the hours about noonday the sun 
seemed to strike physically on the head and back 
whoever stepped out into it, and the smallest fleck 
of white cloud gave great and instant relief. From 
ten to four, more or less, the city was strangely 
quiet, as if more than half asleep, or away on a 
vacation, and over it hung that indefinable scent 
peculiar to Arab and Spanish countries. Compared 




A peon restaurant in the market-place of San Luis Potosi 




A market woman of San Luis Potosi 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 13 

with Spain, however, its night life and movement 
was slight. 

Convicts in perpendicularly striped blue and 
white pajamas worked in the streets. That is, they 
moved once every twenty minutes or so, usually to 
roll a cigarette. They were without shackles, but 
several guards in brown uniforms and broad felt 
hats, armed with thick-set muskets, their chests 
criss-crossed with belts of long rifle cartridges, 
lolled in the shade of every near-by street corner. 
The prisoners laughed and chatted like men per- 
fectly contented with their lot, and moved about with 
great freedom. One came a block to ask me the 
time, and loafed there some fifteen minutes before 
returning to his " labor." 

Mexico is strikingly faithful to its native dress. 
Barely across the Rio Grande the traveler sees at 
once hundreds of costumes which in any American 
city would draw on all the boy population as surely 
as the Piper of Hamelin. First and foremost comes 
always the enormous hat, commonly of thick felt 
with decorative tape, the crown at least a foot high, 
the brim surely three feet in diameter even when 
turned up sufficient to hold a half gallon of water. 
That of the peon is of straw ; he too wears the skin- 
tight trousers, and goes barefoot but for a flat 
leather sandal held by a thong between the big toe 
and the rest. In details and color every dress was 
as varied and individual as the shades of complexion. 



U TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

My hotel room had a fine outlook to summer-blue 
mountains, but was blessed with neither mirror, 
towel, nor water. I descended to the alleyway 
between " dining-room " and barnyard, where I had 
seen the general washbasin, but found the landlady 
seated on the kitchen floor shelling into it peas for 
our almuerzo. This and the evening comida were 
always identically the same. A cheerful but slat- 
ternly Indian woman set before me a thin soup con- 
taining a piece of squash and a square of boiled beef, 
and eight hot corn tortillas of the size and shape of 
our pancakes, or gkebis, the Arab bread, which it 
outdid in toughness, and totally devoid of taste. 
Next followed a plate of rice with peppers, a plate 
of tripe less tough than it should have been, and a 
plate of brown beans which was known by the name 
of chile con came, but in which I never succeeded in 
finding anything carnal. Every meal ended with a 
cup of the blackest coffee. 

Out at the end of calle B a well-worn rocky path 
leads up to a ruined chapel on the summit of a hill, 
the famous Obispado from which the city was 
shelled and taken by the Americans in 1847. 
Below, Monterey lies flat, with many low trees peer- 
ing above the whitish houses, all set in a perfectly 
level plain giving a great sense of roominess, as if 
it could easily hold ten such cities. At the foot of 
the hill, some three hundred feet high, is an unoc- 
cupied space. Then the city begins, leisurely at 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 15 

first, with few houses and many gardens and trees, 
thickening farther on. All about are mountains. 
The Silla (Saddle), a sharp rugged height backing 
the city on the right, has a notch in it much like the 
seat of a Texas saddle ; to the far left are fantastic 
sharp peaks, and across the plain a ragged range 
perhaps fifteen miles distant shuts off the view. 
Behind the chapel stand Los Dientes, a teeth or saw- 
like range resembling that behind Lecco in Italy. 
Only a young beggar and his female mate occupied 
the ruined chapel, built, like the town, of whitish 
stone that is soft when dug but hardens upon ex- 
posure to the air. They cooked on the littered floor 
of one of the dozen rooms-, and all the walls of the 
chamber under the great dome were set with pegs 
for birds, absent now, but which had carpeted the 
floor with proof of their frequent presence. 

At five the sun set over the city, so high is the 
Dientes range, but for some time still threw a soft 
light on the farther plain and hills. Compared with 
our own land there is something profoundly peace- 
ful in this climate and surroundings. Now the sun- 
shine slipped up off the farther ranges, showing 
only on the light band of clouds high above the 
farther horizon, and a pale-faced moon began to 
brighten, heralding a brilliant evening. 

Fertile plains of corn stretched south of the city, 
but already dry, and soon giving way to mesquite 
and dust again. Mountains never ceased, and lay 



16 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

fantastically heaped up on every side. We rose 
ever higher, though the train kept a moderate 
speed. At one station the bleating of a great truck- 
load of kids, their legs tied, heaped one above the 
other, was startlingly like the crying of babies. 
We steamed upward through a narrow pass, the 
mountains crowding closer on either hand and seem- 
ing to grow lower as we rose higher among them. 
The landscape became less arid, half green, with 
little or no cactus, and the breeze cooled steadily. 
Saltillo at last, five thousand feet up, was above the 
reach of oppressive summer and for perhaps the first 
time since leaving Chicago I did not suffer from the 
heat. It was almost a pleasure to splash through 
the little puddles in its poorly paved streets. Its 
plazas were completely roofed with trees, the view 
down any of its streets was enticing, and the little 
cubes of houses were painted all possible colors with- 
out any color scheme whatever. Here I saw the 
first pulquerias, much like cheap saloons in appear- 
ance, with swinging doors, sometimes a pool table, 
and a bartender of the customary I-tell-yer-I 'm- 
tough physiognomy. Huge earthen jars of the fer- 
mented cactus juice stood behind the bar, much like 
milk in appearance, and was served in glazed pots, 
size to order. In Mexico pulqueria stands for 
saloon and peluqueria for barber-shop, resulting now 
and then in sad mistakes by wandering Yankees 
innocent of Spanish. 




s 

o 



OS 

id 

OS 

a 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 19 

There were a hundred adult passengers by actual 
count, to say nothing of babies and unassorted 
bundles, in the second-class car that carried me on 
south into the night. Every type of Mexican was 
represented, from white, soft, city-bred specimens 
to sturdy countrymen so brown as to be almost 
black. A few men were in " European " garb. 
Most of them were dressed a la peon, very tight 
trousers fitting like long leggings, collarless shirts 
of all known colors, a gay faja or cloth belt, some- 
times a coat — always stopping at the waist. Then 
last, but never least, the marvelous hat. Two peons 
trying to get through the same door at once was a 
sight not soon to be forgotten. There were felt and 
straw hats of every possible grade and every shade 
and color except red, wound with a rich band about 
the crown and another around the brim. Those of 
straw were of every imaginable weave, some of rat- 
tan, like baskets or veranda furniture. The Mex- 
ican male seems to be able to endure sameness of 
costume below it, but unless his hat is individual, 
life is a drab blank to him. With his hat off the 
peon loses seven eights of his impressiveness. The 
women, with only a black sort of thin shawl over 
their heads, were eminently inconspicuous in the 
forest of hatted men. 

Mournfully out of the black drizzling night about 
the station came the dismal wails of hawkers at their 
little stands dim-lighted by pale lanterns ; " Anda 



20 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

pulque! " Within the car was more politeness — 
or perhaps, more exactly, more unconscious con- 
sideration for others than north of the Rio Grande. 
There were many women among us, yet all the night 
through there was not a suggestion of indecency or 
annoyance. Indian blood largely predominated, 
hardy, muscular, bright-eyed fellows, yet in conduct 
all were cdballeros. Near me sat a family of three. 
The father, perhaps twenty, was strikingly hand- 
some in his burnished copper skin, his heavy black 
hair, four or five inches long, hanging down in 
" bangs " below his hat. The mother was even 
younger, yet the child was already some two years 
old, the chubbiest, brightest-eyed bundle of human- 
ity imaginable. In their fight for a seat the man 
shouted to the wife to hand him the child. He 
caught it by one hand and swung it high over two 
seats and across the car, yet it never ceased smiling. 
The care this untutored fellow took to give wife and 
child as much comfort as possible was superior to 
that many a " civilized " man would have shown all 
night under the same circumstances. Splendid 
teeth were universal among the peons. There was 
no chewing of tobacco, but much spitting by both 
sexes. A delicate, child-like young woman drew out 
a bottle and swallowed whole glassfuls of what 
I took to be milk, until the scent of pulque, the native 
beverage, suddenly reached my nostrils. 

The fat brown auditor addressed senora, the 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 21 

peon's wife, with the highest respect, even if he in- 
sisted on doing his duty to the extent of pushing 
aside the skirts of the women to peer under the long 
wooden bench for passengers. A dispute soon 
arose. Fare was demanded of a ragged peon for the 
child of three under his arm. The peon shook his 
head, smiling. The auditor's voice grew louder. 
Still the father smiled silently. The ticket collector 
stepped back into the first-class car and returned 
with the train guard, a boyish-looking fellow in peon 
garb from hat to legging trousers, with a brilliant 
red tie, two belts of enormous cartridges about his 
waist, in his hand a short ugly rifle, and a harm- 
less smile on his face. There was something fas- 
cinating about the stocky little fellow with his half- 
embarrassed grin. One felt that of himself he 
would do no man hurt, yet that a curt order would 
cause him to send one of those long steel- jacketed 
bullets through a man and into the mountain side 
beyond. Luckily he got no such orders. The audi- 
tor pointed out the malefactor, who lost no time 
in paying the child's half-fare. 

This all-night trip must be done sooner or later 
by all who enter Mexico by way of Laredo, for the 
St. Louis-Mexico City Limited with its sleeping-car 
behind and a few scattered Americans in first-class 
is the only one that covers this section. Residents 
of Vanegas, for example, who wish to travel south 
must be at the station at three in the morning. 



22 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Most of the night the train toiled painfully upward. 
As a man scorns to set out after a hearty meal with 
a lunch under his arm, so in the swelter of Texas 
I had felt it foolish to be lugging a bundle of heavy 
clothing. By midnight I began to credit myself 
with foresight. The windows were closed, yet the 
land of yesterday seemed far behind indeed. I 
wrapped my heavy coat about me. Toward four 
we crossed the Tropic of Cancer into the Torrid 
Zone, without a jolt, and I dug out my gray sweater 
and regretted I had abandoned the old blue one in 
an empty box-car. Twice I think I drowsed four 
minutes with head and elbow on my bundle, but 
except for two or three women who jack-knifed on 
the long bench no one found room to lie down during 
the long night. 

From daylight on I stood in the vestibule and 
watched the drab landscape hurry steadily past. 
No mountains were in sight now because we were 
on top of them. Yet no one would have suspected 
from the appearance of the country that we were 
considerably more than a mile above sea-level. The 
flat land looked not greatly different from that of 
the day before. The cactus was higher ; some of 
the "organ" variety, many of the " Spanish bay- 
onet " species, lance-like stalks eight to ten feet 
high. The rest was bare ground with scattered 
mesquite bushes. Had I not known the altitude I 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 23 

might have attributed the slight light-headedness to 
a sleepless night. 

Certainly a hundred ragged cargadores, hotel 
runners, and boys eager to carry my bundle attacked 
me during my escape from the station of San Luis 
Potosf at seven, and there were easily that many 
carriages waiting, without a dozen to take them. 
The writer of Mexico's Baedeker speaks of the city 
as well-to-do. Either it has vastly changed in a 
few years or he wrote it up by absent treatment. 
Hardly a town of India exceeds it in picturesque 
poverty. Such a surging of pauperous humanity, 
dirt, and uncomplaining misery I had never before 
seen in the Western Hemisphere. Plainly the name 
" republic " is no cure for man's ills. The chief 
center was the swarming market. Picture a dense 
mob of several thousand men and boys, gaunt, 
weather-beaten, their tight trousers collections of 
rents and patchwork in many colors, sandals of a 
soft piece of leather showing a foot cracked, black- 
ened, tough as a hoof, as incrusted with filth as a dead 
foot picked up on a garbage heap, the toes always 
squirting with mud, the feet not merely never washed 
but the sandal never removed until it wears off and 
drops of its self. Above this a collarless shirt, 
blouse or short jacket, ragged, patched, of many 
faded colors, yet still showing half the body. Then 
a dull, uncomplaining, take-things-as-they-come 



24 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

face, unwashed, never shaved — the pure Indian 
grows a sort of dark down on his cheeks and the 
point of the chin, the half-breeds a slight beard — 
all topped by the enormous hat, never missing, 
though often full of holes, black with dirt, weather- 
beaten beyond expression. 

Then there were fully as many women and girls, 
even less fortunate, for they had not even sandals, 
but splashed along barefoot among the small cold 
cobblestones. Their dress seemed gleaned from a 
rag-heap and their heads were bare, their black hair 
combed or plastered flat. Children of both sexes 
were exact miniatures of their elders. All these 
wretches were here to sell. Yet what was for sale 
could easily have been tended by twenty persons. 
Instead, every man, woman, and child had his own 
stand, or bit of cloth or cobblestone on which to 
spread a few scanty, bedraggled wares. Such a 
mass of silly, useless, pathetic articles, toy jars, old 
bottles, anything that could be found in all the 
dump-heaps of Christendom. The covered market 
housed only a very small percentage of the whole. 
There was a constant, multicolored going and com- 
ing, with many laden asses and miserable, gaunt 
creatures bent nearly double under enormous loads 
on head or shoulders. Every radiating narrow 
mud-dripping street for a quarter-mile was covered 
in all but the slight passageway in the center with 
these displays. Bedraggled women sat on the 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 25 

cobbles with aprons spread out and on them little 
piles of six nuts each, sold at a centavo. There 
were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains, 
bananas short and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf 
peaches, small wild grapes, oranges green in color, 
potatoes often no larger than marbles, as if the pos- 
sessor could not wait until they grew up before 
digging them; cactus leaves, the spines shaved off, 
cut up into tiny squares to serve as food; bundles 
of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling old 
women or on dismal asses and sold as fuel, aguacates, 
known to us as " alligator pears " and tasting to the 
uninitiated like axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans, 
cheeses flat and white, every species of basket and 
earthen jar from two-inch size up, turnips, some cut 
in two for those who could not afford a whole one; 
onions, flat slabs of brown, muddy-looking soap, rice, 
every species of frijole or bean, shelled corn for tor- 
tillas, tomatoes — tomate coloradito, though many 
were tiny and green as if also prematurely gathered 
— peppers red and green, green-corn with most of 
the kernels blue, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, 
cabbages, melons of every size except large, string- 
beans, six-inch cones of the muddiest of sugar, the 
first rough product of the crushers wound in swamp 
grass and which prospective purchasers handled 
over and over, testing them now and then by biting 
off a small corner, though there was no apparent 
difference ; sausages with links of marble size, every- 



26 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

thing in the way of meat, tossed about in the dirt, 
swarming with flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny 
bits for purchasers ; even strips of intestines, the 
jaw-bone of a sheep with barely the smell of meat 
on it ; all had value to this gaunt community, noth- 
ing was too green, or old, or rotten to be offered for 
sale. Chickens with legs tied lay on the ground 
or were carried about from day to day until pur- 
chasers of such expensive luxuries appeared. There 
were many men with a little glass box full of squares 
of sweets like " fudge," selling at a half-cent each ; 
every possible odd and end of the shops was there; 
old women humped aver their meager wares, smok- 
ing cigarettes, offered for sale the scraps of calico 
left over from the cutting of a gown, six-inch tri- 
angles of no fathomable use to purchasers. There 
were entire blocks selling only long strips of leather 
for the making of sandals. Many a vendor had all 
the earmarks of leprosy. There were easily five 
thousand of them, besides another market on the 
other side of the town, for this poverty-stricken city 
of some fifty thousand inhabitants. The swarming 
stretched a half mile away in many a radiating 
street, and scores whose entire stock could not be 
worth fifteen cents sat all day without selling more 
than half of it. An old woman stopped to pick up 
four grains of corn and greedily tucked them away 
in the rags that covered her emaciated frame. 
Now and then a better-dressed potosino passed, 




•. 



The former home, in Dolores Hidalgo, of the Mexican "Father of 
his Country" 




Rancho de Capulin, where I ended the first day of tramping in 
Mexico 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 29 

making purchases, a peon, male or female, slinking 
along behind with a basket ; for it is a horrible breach 
of etiquette for a ten-dollar-a-month Mexican to be 
publicly seen carrying anything. 

One wondered why there was not general suicide 
in such a community of unmitigated misery. Why 
did they not spring upon me and snatch the purse I 
displayed or die in the attempt? How did they 
resist eating up their own wares ? It seemed strange 
that these sunken-chested, hobbling, halt, shuffling, 
shivering, starved creatures should still fight on for 
life. Why did they not suddenly rise and sack the 
city? No wonder those are ripe for revolution 
whose condition cannot be made worse. 

Policemen in sandals and dark-blue shoddy cap 
and cloak looked little less miserable than the peons. 
All about the covered market were peon restaurants, 
a ragged strip of canvas as roof, under it an ancient 
wooden table and two benches. Unwashed Indian 
women cooked in several open earthen bowls the 
favorite Mexican dishes, — frijoles (a stew of brown 
beans), chile con carne, rice, stews of stray scraps 
of meat and the leavings of the butcher-shops. 
These were dished up in brown glazed j ars and eaten 
with strips of tortilla folded between the fingers, 
as the Arab eats with gkebis. Indeed there were 
many things reminiscent of the markets and streets 
of Damascus, more customs similar to those of the 
Moor than the Spaniard could have brought over, 



30 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

and the brown, wrinkled old women much resembled 
those of Palestine, though their noses were flatter 
and their features heavier. 

Yet it was a good-natured crowd. In all my 
wandering in it I heard not an unpleasant word, not 
a jest at my expense, almost no evidence of anti- 
foreign feeling, which seems not indigenous to the 
peon, but implanted in him by those of ulterior 
motives. Nor did they once ask alms or attempt 
to push misery forward. The least charitable 
would be strongly tempted to succor any one of the 
throng individually, but here a hundred dollars in 
American money divided into Mexican centavos 
would hardly go round. Here and there were pul- 
querias full of besotted, shouting men — and who 
would not drink to drown such misery? 

There was not a male of any species but had his 
colored blanket, red, purple, Indian-yellow, gener- 
ally with two black stripes, the poorer with a strip 
of old carpet. These they wound about their 
bodies, folding them across the chest, the arms 
hugged together inside in such a* way as to bring 
a corner across the mouth and nose, leaving their 
pipe-stem legs below, and wandered thus dismally 
about in the frequent spurts of cold rain. Now and 
then a lowest of the low passed in the cast-off rem- 
nants of " European " clothes, which were evidently 
considered far inferior to peon garb, however be- 
draggled. Bare or sandaled feet seemed impervious 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 31 

to cold, again like the Arab, as was also this fear 
of the raw air and half covering of the face that 
gave a Mohammedan touch, especially to the women. 
To me the atmosphere was no different than late 
October in the States. The peons evidently never 
shaved, though there were many miserable little 
barber-shops. On the farther outskirts of the 
hawkers were long rows of shanties, shacks made of 
everything under the sun, flattened tin cans, scraps 
of rubbish, two sticks holding up a couple of ragged 
bags under which huddled old women with scraps 
of cactus and bundles of tiny fagots. 

Scattered through the throng were several 
" readers." One half-Indian woman I passed many 
times was reading incessantly, with the speed of a 
Frenchman, from printed strips of cheap colored 
paper which she offered for sale at a cent each. 
They were political in nature, often in verse, insult- 
ing in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity 
at which the dismal multitude laughed bestially. 
Three musicians, one with a rude harp, a boy strik- 
ing a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar 
to those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both 
music and reading motionless, with expressionless 
faces, with never a " move on " from the policeman, 
who seemed the least obstrusive of mortals. 

San Luis Potosi has many large rich churches, 
misery and pseudo-religion being common joint- 
legacies of Spanish rule. Small chance these crea- 



m TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

tures would have of feeling at home in a place so 
different from their earthly surroundings as the 
Christian heaven. The thump of church bells, some 
with the voice of battered old tin pans, broke out 
frequently. Now and then one of these dregs of 
humanity crept into church for a nap, but the huge 
edifices showed no other sign of usefulness. On the 
whole there was little appearance of " religion." A 
few women were seen in the churches, a book-seller 
sold no novels and little literature but " mucho de 
religion," but the great majority gave no outward 
sign of belonging to any faith. Priests were not 
often seen in the streets. Mexican law forbids them 
to wear a distinctive costume, hence they dressed in 
black derbies, Episcopal neckbands, and black capes 
to the ankles. Not distinctive indeed! No one 
could have guessed what they were ! One might have 
fancied them prize-fighters on the way from train- 
ing quarters to bathroom. 

There is comparative splendor also in San Luis, as 
one may see by peeps into the lighted houses at night, 
but it is shut in tight as if fearful of the poor break- 
ing in. As in so many Spanish countries, wealth 
shrinks . out of sight and misery openly parades 
itself. 

Out across the railroad, where hundreds of ragged 
boys were riding freight cars back and forth in front 
of the station, the land lay flat as a table, some 
cactus here and there, but apparently fertile, with 



n°"*DAI.Up E 




C- Canoas*- 

tSaa riorjj 
ban Andreas f 01 

«N BENITO / „ *. . \P° 3 '" 
CEDRos", /) p ^ < ^ 

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■ft. Sin £^„f 'v^^g| : <ra^, 

•Asuncion B\l 
^^■Sipolitojsy % 
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MJUX 



SCALE OF STA T 

100 isP 

SCALE OF KIDW 



State Capitals 
Important Towns 
RauTroade 



shown tr$ 



INTO THE COOLER SOUTH 33 

neither sod to break nor clearing necessary. Yet 
nowhere, even on the edge of the starving city, was 
there a sign of cultivation. We of the North were 
perhaps kinder to the Indian in killing him off. 



CHAPTER II 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 



HEAVY weather still hung over the land to the 
southward. Indian corn, dry and shriveled, 
was sometimes shocked as in the States. The first 
field of maguey appeared, planted in long rows, 
barely a foot high, but due in a year or two to pro- 
duce pulque, the Mexican scourge, because of its 
cheapness, stupefying the poorer classes. When 
fresh, it is said to be beneficial in kidney troubles and 
other ailments, but soon becomes over fermented in 
the pulquerfas of the cities and more harmful than a 
stronger liquor. 

Within the car was an American of fifty, thin and 
drawn, with huddled shoulders, who had been beaten 
by rebel forces in Zacatecas and robbed of his worldly 
wealth of $13,000 hidden in vain in his socks. Num- 
bers of United States box-cars jolted across the 
country end to end with Mexican ; the " B. & 0." be- 
hind the " Norte de Mejico," the " N. Y. C," fol- 
lowed by the " Central Mejicano." Long broad 
stretches of plain, with cactus and mesquite, spread 

to low mountains blue with cold morning mist, all but 

34 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 35 

their base hung with fog. Beyond Jesus Maria, 
which is a sample of the station names, peons lived in 
bedraggled tents along the way, and the corn was 
even drier. The world seemed threatening to dry up 
entirely. At Cartagena there began veritable for- 
ests of cactus trees, and a wild scrub resembling the 
olive. Thousands of tunas, the red fruit of the 
cactus, dotted the ground along the way. The sun 
sizzled its way through the heavy sky as we climbed 
the flank of a rocky range, the vast half forested 
plain to the east sinking lower and lower as we rose. 
Then came broken country with many muddy streams. 
It was the altitude perhaps that caused the patent 
feeling of exhilaration, as much as the near prospect 
of taking again to the open road. 

As the " garrotero " (" twister," or " choker " as 
the brakeman is called in Mexico) announced Dolores 
Hidalgo, I slipped four cartridges into my auto- 
matic. The roadways of Mexico offered unknown 
possibilities. A six-foot street-car drawn — when 
at all — by mules, stood at the station, but I struck 
off across the rolling country by a footpath that 
probably led to the invisible town. A half-mile lay 
behind me before I met the first man. He was riding 
an ass, but when I gave him " Buenos dias," he re- 
plied with a whining : " Una limosnita ! A little 
alms, for the love of God." He wore a rosary about 
his neck and a huge cross on his chest. When I ig- 
nored his plea he rode on mumbling. The savage 



36 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

bellow of a bull not far off suggested a new possible 
danger on the road in this unfenced and almost tree- 
less country. More men passed on asses, mules, and 
horses, but none afoot. Finally over the brown rise 
appeared Dolores Hidalgo ; two enormous churches 
and an otherwise small town in a tree-touched valley. 
The central plaza, with many trees and hedges 
trimmed in the form of animals, had in its center the 
statue of the priest Hidalgo y Costilla, the " father 
of Mexican independence." A block away, packed 
with pictures and wreathes and with much of the old 
furniture as he left it, was the house in which he had 
lived before he started the activities that ended in 
the loss of his head. 

Well fortified at the excellent hotel, I struck out 
past the patriot priest's house over an arched bridge 
into the open country. As in any unknown land, the 
beginning of tramping was not without a certain 
mild misgiving. The " road " was only a trail and 
soon lost itself. A boy speaking good Spanish 
walked a long mile to set me right, and valued his 
services at a centavo. A half-cent seemed to be the 
fixed fee for anything among these country people. 
A peon carrying a load of deep-green alfalfa de- 
manded as much for the privilege of photographing 
him when he was " not dressed up." He showed no 
sign whatever of gratitude when I doubled it and 
added a cigarette. 

The bright sun had now turned the day to early 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 39 

June. The so-called road was a well-trodden sandy 
path between high cactus hedges over rolling country. 
An hour out, the last look back on Dolores Hidalgo 
showed also mile upon mile of rolling plain to far, 
far blue sierras, all in all perhaps a hundred square 
miles visible. There were many travelers, chiefly on 
foot and carrying bundles on their heads. The 
greeting of these was " Adios," while the better-to-do 
class on horse or mule back used the customary 
lopfa*.^ " Buenas tardes ! " Thirst grew, but though the 
country was broken, with many wash-outs cutting 
deep across the trail, the streams were all muddy. 
Now and then a tuna on the cactus hedges was red 
ripe enough to be worth picking and, though full of 
seeds, was at least wet. It was harder to handle 
than a porcupine, and commonly left the fingers full 
of spines. Two men passed, offering dulces, a species 
of native candy, for sale. I declined. " Muy bien, 
give us a cigarette." I declined again, being low in 
stock. " Very well, adios, senor," they replied in 
the apathetic way of their race, as if it were quite as 
satisfactory to them to get nothing as what they 
asked. 

The Rancho del Capulm, where night overtook me, 
was a hamlet of eight or ten houses, some mere stacks 
of thatch, out of the smoky doorway of which, three 
feet high, peered the half-naked inmates ; others 
of adobe, large bricks of mud and chopped straw, 
which could be picked to pieces with the fingers. 



40 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

From one of the kennels a woman called out to know 
if I would eat. I asked if she could give lodging also 
and she referred me to her husband inside. I stopped 
to peer in through the doorway and he answered 
there was not room enough as it was, which was 
evident to the slowest-witted, for the family of six 
or eight of all ages, more or less dressed, lying and 
squatted about the earth floor dipping their fingers 
into bowls of steaming food, left not a square foot 
unoccupied. He advised me to go " beg license " of 
the " senora " of the house farther on, a low adobe 
building with wooden doors. 

" There is nothing but the place opposite," she 
answered. 

This was a sort of mud cave, man-made and door- 
less, the uneven earth floor covered with excrement, 
human and otherwise. I returned to peer into the 
mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un- 
threshed beans, and met the man of the house just 
arriving with his labor-worn burros. He was a 
sinewy peasant of about fifty, dressed like all country 
peons in shirt and tight trousers of thinnest white 
cotton, showing his brown skin here and there. As 
he hesitated to give me answer, the wife made frantic 
signs to him from behind the door, of which the 
cracks were inches wide. He caught the hint and 
replied to my request for lodging : 

" Only if you pay me three centavos." 

Such exorbitance ! The regulation price was per- 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 41 

haps one. But I yielded, for it was raining, and en- 
tered, to sit down on a heap of unthreshed beans. 
The woman brought me a mat three feet long, evi- 
dently destined to be my bed. I was really in the 
family barnyard, with no end walls, chickens over- 
head and the burros beyond. The rain took to drip- 
ping through the mat roof, and as I turned back 
toward the first hut for the promised frijoles and 
tortillas the woman called to me to say she also 
could furnish me supper. 

The main room of the house was about ten by ten, 
with mud walls five feet high, a pitched roof of some 
sort of grass with several holes in it. In the center 
of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four 
square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire 
of encinal fagots. The walls were black with soot 
of the smoke that partly wandered out of an irregu- 
lar hole in the farther end of the room. The eight- 
year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with 
great gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and 
chewing the stalk as others do sugar-cane. I handed 
him a loaf of potosino bread and he answered a per- 
functory " Gracias," but neither he nor any of the 
family showed any evidence of gratitude as he wolfed 
it. The man complained that all the corn had dried 
up for lack of rain. The woman set before me a 
bowl of " sopita," with tortillas, white cheese, and 
boiled whole peppers. A penniless peon traveler 
begged a cigarette and half my morning loaf, and 



42 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

went out into the night and rain to sleep in the 
" chapel," as the mud cave across the way was called. 
There several travelers had settled down for the 
night. A girl of seventeen or so splashed across 
from it to beg "a jar of water for a poor prosti- 
tute," apparently announcing her calling merely as 
a curious bit of information. 

The family took at last to eating and kept it up 
a full hour, meanwhile discussing me thoroughly. 
Like most untutored races, they fancied I could not 
understand their ordinary tones. When they wished 
to address me they merely spoke louder. It is re- 
markable how Spain has imposed her language on 
even these wild, illiterate Indians as England has not 
even upon her colonies. As the rain continued to 
pour, I was to sleep in the kitchen. . Drunken peons 
were shouting outside and the family seemed much 
frightened, keeping absolute silence. The four by 
two door with its six-inch cracks was blocked with a 
heavy pole, the family retired to the other room, and 
I stretched out in the darkness on the unsteady 
wooden bench, a foot wide, my head on my knapsack. 
I was soon glad of having a sweater, but that failed 
to cover my legs, and I slept virtually not at all 
through a night at least four months long, punctu- 
ated by much howling of dogs. 

It was still pitch dark when the " senora " entered, 
to spend a long time getting a fire started with wet 
fagots. Then she began making atole. Taking 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 4$ 

shelled corn from an earthen jar, she sprinkled it in 
the hallow of a stone and crushed it with much labor. 
This was put into water, strained through a sieve, 
then thrown into a kettle of boiling water. It was 
much toil for little food. Already she had labored 
a full hour. I asked for coffee, and she answered 
she had none but would buy some when the " store " 
opened. It grew broad daylight before this hap- 
pened and I accepted atole. It was hot, but as taste- 
less as might be the water from boiled corn-stalks. 
There had been much discussion, supposedly unknown 
to me, the night before as to how much they dared 
charge me. The bill was finally set at twelve centa- 
vos (six cents), eight for supper, three for lodging, 
and one for breakfast. It was evidently highly ex- 
orbitant, for the family expressed to each other their 
astonishment that I paid it without protest. 

At the very outset there was a knee-deep river to 
cross. Then miles of a " gumbo " mud that stuck 
like bad habits. My feet at times weighed twenty 
pounds each. Wild rocky hillsides alternated with 
breathless climbs. Many cattle were scattered far 
and wide over the mountains, but there was no cul- 
tivation. I passed an occasional rancho, villages of 
six or seven adobe or thatch huts, with sometimes a 
ruined brick chapel. Flowers bloomed thickly, morn- 
ing glories, geraniums, masses of a dark purple blos- 
som. The " road " was either a mud-hole or a sharp 
path of jagged rolling stones in a barren, rocky, 



44 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

tumbled country. Eleven found me entering another 
rancho in a wild valley. My attempts to buy food 
were several times answered with, " Mas arribita " — 
" A little higher up." I came at last to the " res- 
taurant." It was a cobble-stone hut hung on a 
sharp hillside, with a hole two feet square opening on 
the road. Two men in gay sarapes, with guns and 
belts of huge cartridges, reached it at the same time, 
and we squatted together on the ground at an angle 
of the wall below the window and ate with much ex- 
change of banter the food poked out to us. The 
two had come that morning from Guanajuato, 
whither I was bound, and were headed for Dolores. 
It was the first time I had any certain information 
as to the distance before me, which had been variously 
reported at from five to forty leagues. We ate two 
bowls of frijoles each, and many tortillas and chiles. 
One of the men paid the entire bill of twenty-seven 
centavos, but accepted ten from me under protest. 

Beyond was a great climb along a stony, small 
stream up into a blackish, rocky range. The sun 
shone splendidly, also hotly. Apparently there was 
no danger to travelers even in these wild parts. The 
peons I met were astonishingly incurious, barely ap- 
pearing to notice my existence. Some addressed me 
as " jefe" (chief), suggesting the existence of mines 
in the vicinity. If I drew them into conversation 
they answered merely in monosyllables : " Si, sefior." 
"No, jefe." Not a word of Indian dialect had I 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 45 

heard since entering the country. Two hours above 
the restaurant a vast prospect of winding, tumbled, 
rocky valley and mountain piled upon mountain be- 
yond opened out* From the summit, surely nine 
thousand feet up, began the rocky descent to the 
town of Santa Rosa, broken by short climbs and 
troublesome with rocks. I overtook many donkeys 
loaded with crates of cactus fruit, railroad ties, and 
the like, and finally at three came out in sight of the 
famous mining city of Guanajuato. 

It would take the pen of a master to paint the 
blue labyrinth of mountains heaped up on all sides 
and beyond the long, winding city in the narrow 
gorge far below, up out of which came with each 
puff of wind the muffled sound of stamp-mills and 
smelters. As I sat, the howling of three drunken 
peons drifted up from the road below. When they 
reached me, one of them, past forty, thrust his un- 
washed, pulque-perfumed face into mine and de- 
manded a cigarette. When I declined, he continued 
to beg in a threatening manner. Meanwhile the 
drunkest of the three, a youth of perhaps seventeen, 
large and muscular, an evil gleam in his eye, edged 
his way up to me with one arm behind him and added 
his demands to that of the other. I suddenly pulled 
the hidden hand into sight and found in it a sharp 
broken piece of rock weighing some ten pounds. 
Having knocked this out of his grasp, I laid my au- 
tomatic across my knees and the more sober pair 



46 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

dragged the belligerent youth on up the mountain 
trail. 

For an hour the way wound down by steep, hor- 
ribly cobbled descents, then between mud and stone 
huts, and finally down a more level and wider cobbled 
street along which were the rails of a mule tramway. 
The narrow city wound for miles along the bottom of 
a deep gully, gay everywhere with perennial flowers. 
The main avenue ran like a stream along the bottom, 
and he who lost himself in the stair-like side streets 
had only to follow downward to find it again as 
surely as a tributary its main river. Masses of 
rocky mountains were piled up on all sides. 

The climate of Guanajuato is unsurpassed. 
Brilliant sunshine flooded days like our early June, 
in which one must hurry to sweat in the noon time, 
while two blankets made comfortable covering at 
night. This is true of not only one season but the 
year around, during which the thermometer does not 
vary ten degrees. July is coldest and a fireplace not 
uncomfortable in the evening. An American resi- 
dent who went home to one of the States bordering 
on Canada for his vacation sat wiping the sweat out 
of his eyes there, when one of his untraveled coun- 
trymen observed: 

" You must feel very much at home in this heat 
after nine years in Mexico." 

Whereupon the sufferer arose in disgust, packed 
his bag, and sped south to mosquitoless coolness. 




Fellow-roadsters in Mexico 




Some of the pigeon-holes of Guanajuato's cemetery 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 49 

The evening air is indescribable; all nature's 
changes of striking beauty ; and the setting sun 
throwing its last rays on the Bufa, the salient points 
of that and the other peaks purple with light, with 
the valleys in deep shadow, is a sight worth tramping 
far to see. 

I drifted down along the gully next morning, fol- 
lowing the main street, which changed direction every 
few yards, " paved " with three-inch cobbles, the 
sidewalks two feet wide, leaving one pedestrian to 
jump off it each time two met. A diminutive street- 
car drawn by mules with jingling bells passed now 
and then. Peons swarmed here also, but there was 
by no means the abject poverty of San Luis Potosi, 
and Americans seemed in considerable favor, as their 
mines in the vicinity give the town its livelihood. I 
was seeking the famous old " Alondiga," but the po- 
liceman I asked began looking at the names of the 
shops along the way as if he fancied it some tobacco 
booth. I tried again by designating it as " la car- 
jfeL" He still shook his head sadly. But when I 
described it as the place where Father Hidalgo's head 
hung on a hook for thirteen years, a great light broke 
suddenly upon him and he at once abandoned his 
beat and led me several blocks, refusing to be shaken 
off. What I first took for extreme courtesy, how- 
ever, turned out to be merely the quest of tips, an 
activity in which the police of most Mexican cities 
are scarcely outdone by the waiters along Broadway. 




50 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

The ancient building was outwardly plain and 
nearly square, more massive than the rest of the city. 
High up on each of its corners under the rusted 
hooks were the names of the four early opponents to 
Spanish rule whose heads had once hung there. In- 
side the corridor stood the statue of the peon who is 
said to have reached and fired the building under 
cover of the huge slab of stone on his back. When I 
had waited a while in the anteroom, the jefe politico, 
the supreme commander of the city appointed by the 
governor of the State, appeared, the entire roomful 
of officials and visitors dropping their cigarettes and 
rising to greet him with bared heads. He gave me 
permission to enter, and the presidente, a podgy sec- 
ond jailor, took me in charge as the iron door opened 
to let me in. The walls once red with the blood of 
Spaniards slaughtered by the forces of the priest of 
Dolores had lost that tint in the century since passed, 
and were smeared with nothing more startling than a 
certain lack of cleanliness. The immense, three- 
story, stone building of colonial days enclosed a vast 
patio in which prisoners seemed to enjoy complete 
freedom, lying about the yard in the brilliant sun- 
shine, playing cards, or washing themselves and their 
scanty clothing in the huge stone fountain in the 
center. The so-called cells in which they were shut 
up in groups during the night were large chambers 
that once housed the colonial government. By day 
many of them work at weaving hats, baskets, brushes, 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 51 

and the like, to sell for their own benefit, thus being 
able to order food from outside and avoid the mess 
brought in barrels at two and seven of each after- 
noon for those dependent on government rations. 
Now and then a wife or feminine friend of one of the 
prisoners appeared at the grating with a basket of 
food. Several of the inmates were called one by one 
to the crack of an iron door in the wall to hear the 
sentence the judge had chosen to impose upon them 
in the quiet of his own home; for public jury trial 
is not customary in Spanish America. 

In the fine gallery around the patio, in the second- 
story, we were joined by an American from Colorado, 
charged with killing a Mexican, but who seemed 
little worried with his present condition or doubtful 
of his ultimate release. From the flat roof, large 
enough for a school playground, there spread out a 
splendid view of all the city and its surrounding 
mountains. There were, all told, some five hundred 
prisoners. A room opening on the patio served as 
a school for convicts, where a man well advanced in 
years, bewhiskered and of a decidedly pedagogical 
cast of countenance in spite of his part Indian blood, 
sat on his back, peering dreamily through his glasses 
at the seventy or more pupils, chiefly between the 
ages of fifteen and twenty, who drowsed before him. 

There is a no less fine view from the hill behind, on 
which sits the Panteon, or city cemetery. It is a 
rectangular place enclosing perhaps three acres, and, 



52 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

as all Guanajuato has been buried here for centuries, 
considerably crowded. For this reason and from 
inherited Spanish custom, bodies are seldom buried, 
but are pigeonholed away in the deep nitches two 
feet square into what from the outside looks to be 
merely the enclosing wall. Here, in more exact or- 
der than prevails in life, the dead of Guanajuato are 
filed in series, each designated by a number. Series 
six was new and not yet half occupied. A funeral 
ends by thrusting the coffin into its appointed pigeon- 
hole, which the Indian employees brick up and face 
with cement, in which while still soft the name of the 
defunct and other information is commonly rudely 
scratched with a stick, often with amateur spelling. 
Here and there is one in English : — " My Father's 
Servant — H. B." Some have marble headpieces 
with engraved names, and perhaps a third of the 
nitches bear the information " En Perpetuidad," in- 
dicating that the rent has been paid up until judg- 
ment day. The majority of the corpses, however, 
are dragged out after one to five years and dumped 
in the common bone-yard, as in all Spanish-speaking 
countries. The Indian attendants were even then 
opening several in an older series and tossing skulls 
and bones about amid facetious banter. The lower 
four rows can be reached readily, but not a few suf- 
fer the pain of being " skied," where only those who 
chance to glance upward will notice them. 

There were some graves in the ground, evidently 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 53 

of the poorer Indian classes. Several had been newly 
dug, unearthing former occupants, and a grinning 
skull sat awry on a heap of earth amid a few thigh 
bones and scattered ribs, all trodden under sandaled 
foot-prints. In one hole lay the thick black hair of 
what had once been a peon, as intact as any actor's 
wig. There is some property in the soil of Guana- 
juato's Panteon that preserves bodies buried in the 
ground without coffins, so that its " mummies " have 
become famous. The director attended me in person 
and, crossing the enclosure, opened a door in the 
ground near the fourth series of nitches, where we 
descended a little circular iron stairway. This 
opened on a high vaulted corridor, six feet wide and 
thirty long. Along this, behind glass doors, stood 
some hundred more or less complete bodies shrouded 
in sheets. They retained, or had been arranged, in 
the same form they had presented in life — peon car- 
riers bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market 
women in the act of haggling, arrieros plodding be- 
hind their imaginary burros. Some had their mouths 
wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had 
died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning 
against a support, like a man joking with an elbow 
on the bar, a glass between his fingers, in the act of 
laughing uproariously. Several babies had been 
placed upright here and there between the elders. 
Most of the corpses wore old dilapidated shoes. In 
the farther end of the corridor were stacked thigh- 



54 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

bones and skulls surely sufficient to fill two box-cars, 
all facing to the front. I asked how many deaths 
the collection represented, and the director shrugged 
his shoulders with an indifferent " Quien sabe ? " He 
who would understand the Mexican, descendant of 
the Aztecs, must not overlook a certain apathetic 
indifference to death, and a playful manner with its 
remains. 

Once on earth again, I gave the director a hand- 
ful of coppers and descended to the town, motley now 
with market-day. The place swarmed with color; 
ragged, unwashed males and females squatted on the 
narrow sidewalks with fruit, sweets, gay blankets and 
clothing, cast-off shoes and garments, piles of new 
sandals, spread out in the street before them. Amid 
the babel of street cries the most persistent was 
" Agua-miel! " — " Honey water," as the juice of the 
maguey is called during the twelve hours before fer- 
mentation sets in. From twelve to thirty-six hours 
after its drawing it is intoxicating; from then on, 
only fit to be thrown away. But the sour stench 
from each pulqueria and many a passing peon proved 
a forced longevity. Several lay drunk in the streets, 
but passers-by stepped over or around them with the 
air of those who do as they hope to be done by. 
Laughter was rare, the great majority being exceed- 
ingly somber in manner. Even their songs are 
gloomy wails, recalling the Arabs. A few children 
played at " bull-fight," and here and there two or 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 55 

three, thanks to the American influence, were en- 
gaged in what they fancied was baseball. But for 
the most part they were not playful. The young 
of both Indians and donkeys are trained early for 
the life before them. The shaggy little ass-colts fol- 
low their mothers over the cobbled streets and along 
mountain trails from birth, and the peon children, 
wearing the same huge hat, gay sarape, and tight 
breeches as their fathers, or the identical garb of the 
mothers, carry their share of the family burden al- 
most from infancy. Everything of whatever size 
or shape was carried on the backs or heads of In- 
dians with a supporting strap across the forehead. 
A peon passed bearing on his head the corpse of a 
baby in an open wooden coffin, scattered with flowers. 
Trunks of full size are transported in this way to all 
parts of the mountain town, and the Indian who car- 
ries the heaviest of them to a mine ten miles away 
and two thousand feet above the city over the rocki- 
est trails considers himself well paid at thirty cents. 
Six peons dog-trotted by from the municipal slaugh- 
ter-house with a steer on their backs : four carried a 
quarter each; one the head and skin; and the last, 
heart, stomach, and intestines. Horseshoers worked 
in the open streets, using whatever shoes they had 
on hand without adjustment, paring down the hoofs 
of the animal to fit them. Here and there a police- 
man on his beat was languidly occupied in making 
brushes, like the prisoners of the Alondiga, and two 



56 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

I saw whiling away the time making lace! Several 
of them tagged my footsteps, eager for some errand. 
One feels no great sense of security in a country 
whose boyish, uneducated, and ragged guardians of 
order cringe around like beggar boys hoping for a 
copper. 

Saturday is beggar's day, when those who seek 
alms more or less surreptitiously during the week are 
permitted to pass in procession along the shops, 
many of which disburse on this day a fixed sum, as 
high as twenty dollars, in copper centavos. Now 
and then the mule-cars bowled over a laden ass, 
which sat up calmly on its haunches, front feet in the 
air, until the obstruction passed. All those of In- 
dian blood were notable for their strong white teeth, 
not one of which they seem ever to lose. In the 
church a bit higher up several bedraggled women and 
pulque-besotted peons knelt before a disgusting rep- 
resentation of the Crucifixion. The figure had real 
hair, beard, eyebrows, and even eyelashes, with sev- 
eral mortal wounds, barked knees and shins, half the 
body smeared with red paint as blood, all in all fit 
only for the morgue. Farther on, drowsed the post- 
office, noted like all south of the Rio Grande for its 
unreliability. Unregistered packages seldom arrive 
at their destination, groceries sent from the States to 
American residents are at least half eaten en route. 
A man of the North unacquainted with the ways of 
Mexico sent unregistered a Christmas present of a 




A pulque street-stand and one of its clients 









1 1- 


H^gS^ 




iiiiiii 




v t i./ 






■ 


»isS*^ 


M&^u 


1 


•• 




I 




"1 


t 








^ 


1 :'..:,:..A'-:, ';,■,:! 



Prisoners washing in the patio of the former "Alondiga" 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 59 

dozen pairs of silk socks. The addressee inquired 
for them daily for weeks. Finally he wrote for a 
detailed description of the hectic lost property, and 
had no difficulty in recognizing at least two pairs as 
the beak-nosed officials hitched up their trousers to 
tell him again nothing whatever had come for him. 
Not long before my arrival a Mexican mail-car had 
been wrecked, and between the ceiling and the outer 
wall were found over forty thousand letters postal 
clerks had opened and thrown there. 

I drifted into an " Escuela Gratuita para Ninos." 
The heavy, barn-like door gave entrance to a cobbled 
corridor, opening on a long schoolroom with two rows 
of hard wooden benches on which were seated a half 
hundred little peons aged seven to ten, all raggedly 
dressed in the identical garb, sandals and all, of their 
fathers in the streets, their huge straw hats covering 
one of the walls. The maestro, a small, down-trod- 
den-looking Mexican, rushed to the door to bring me 
down to the front and provide me with a chair. The 
school had been founded some six months before by 
a woman of wealth, and offered free instruction to 
the sons of peons. But the Indians as always were 
suspicious, and for the most part refused to allow 
their children to be taught the " witchcraft " of the 
white man. The teacher asked what class I cared to 
hear and then himself hastily suggested " cuentitas." 
The boys were quick at figures, at least in the ex- 
amples the maestro chose to give them, but he de- 



60 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

clined to show them off in writing or spelling. Sev- 
eral read aloud, in that mumbled and half-pronounced 
manner common to Mexico, the only requirement ap- 
pearing to be speed. Then came a class in " His- 
toria Santa," that is, various of the larger boys arose 
to spout at full gallop and the distinct enunciation of 
an " El " train, the biblical account of the creation 
of the world, the legends of Adam and Eve, Cain and 
Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned 
by rote. The entire school then arose and bowed 
me out. 

A visit to a mixed school, presided over by care- 
lessly dressed maidens of uncertain age and the all- 
knowing glance of those who feel the world and all its 
knowledge lies concentrated in the hollow of their 
hands, showed a quite similar method of instruction. 
On the wall hung a great lithograph depicting in all 
its dreadful details the alleged horrors of " alcool- 
ismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions 
with an atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, 
and he must have been a Spanish scholar indeed who 
could have caught more than the gist of the recited 
answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the 
Catholic system of learning by rote instead of per- 
mitting the development of individual power to think, 
were as marked even in the colegio, corresponding 
roughly to our high schools. Even there the profes- 
sor never commanded, " More distinctly ! " but he 
frequently cried, " Faster ! " 



TRAMPING THE BYWAYS 61 

On the wall of this higher institution was a stern 
set of rules, among which some of the most important 
were: 

" Students must not smoke in the presence of pro- 
fessors," though this was but mildly observed, for 
when I entered the study room with the director and 
his assistant, all of us smoking, the boys, averaging 
fifteen years of age, merely, held their lighted cigar- 
ettes half out of sight behind them until we passed. 
Another rule read : " Any student frequenting a 
tavern, cafe chantant, or house of ill-fame may be 
expelled." He might run that risk in most schools, 
but none but the Latinized races would announce the 
fact in plain words on the bulletin-boards. The di- 
rector complained that the recent revolutions had set 
the school far back, as each government left it to the 
next to provide for such secondary necessities. 



CHAPTER III 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 



A CLASSMATE of my boyhood was superin- 
tendent of the group of mines round about 
Guanajuato. From among them we chose " Pingii- 
ico " for my temporary employment. The ride to it, 
8200 feet above the sea, up along and out of the gully 
in which Guanajuato is built, and by steep rocky 
trails sometimes beside sheer mountain walls, opens 
out many a marvelous vista; but none to Compare 
with that from the office veranda of the mine itself. 
Two thousand feet below lies a plain of Mexico's 
great table-land, stretching forty miles or more 
across to where it is shut off by an endless range of 
mountains, backed by chain after blue chain, each 
cutting the sky-line in more j agged, fantastic fashion 
than the rest, the farther far beyond Guadalajara 
and surely more than a hundred miles distant, where 
Mexico falls away into the Pacific. On the left rises 
deep-blue into the sky the almost perfect flattened 
cone of a lone mountain. Brilliant, yet not hot, sun- 
shine illuminated even the far horizon, and little 

cloud-shadows crawled here and there across the 

62 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 63 

landscape. The rainy season had left on the plain 
below many shallow lakes that reflected the sun like 
immense mirrors. From the veranda it seemed quite 
flat, though in reality by no means so, and one could 
all but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and 
other towns ; the second, though more than twenty 
miles away, still in the back foreground of the pic- 
ture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over 
the plain and up into the mountains, here and there 
dotted by travelers crawling ant-like along them a 
few inches ah hour. Take the most perfect day of 
late May or early June in our North, brush off the 
clouds, make the air many times fresher and clearer, 
add October nights, and multiply the sum total by 
365, and it is more easily understood why Americans 
who settle in the Guanajuato region so frequently re- 
main there. 

The room I shared with a mine boss was of chilly 
stone walls and floor, large and square, with a rug, 
two beds, and the bare necessities. The mine mess, 
run by a Chinaman, furnished meals much like those 
of a 25-cent restaurant in Texas, at the rate of $5 
a week. No Mexican was permitted to eat with the 
Americans, not even with the " rough-necks." When 
the whistle blew at seven next morning, some forty 
peons, who had straggled one by one in the dawn to 
huddle up together in their red sarapes among the 
rocks of the drab hillside, marched past the time- 
keeper, turning over their blankets at a check coun- 



64 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

ter, and with their lunches, of the size of the round 
tortilla at the bottom and four to six inches high, 
in their handkerchiefs, climbed into the six-foot, 
iron ore-bucket until it was completely roofed with 
their immense straw hats. Near by those of the 
second night-shift, homeward bound, halted, to stand 
one by one on a wooden block with outstretched arms 
to be carefully searched for stolen ore by a tried and 
trusted fellow-peon. A pocketful of " high-grade " 
might be worth several dollars. The American 
" jefe " sat in thehoisthouse, writing out requisitions 
for candles, dynamite, and kindred supplies for the 
" jefecitos," or straw bosses, of the hundred or more 
peons still lined up before the shaft. With the last 
batch of these in the bucket, we white men stepped 
upon the platform below it and dropped suddenly 
into the black depths of the earth, with now and then 
a stone easily capable of cracking a skull bounding 
swiftly with a hollow sound past us back and forth 
across the shaft. 

Not infrequently in the days to come some accident 
to the hoist-engine above left us to stand an hour or 
more packed tightly together in our suspended four- 
foot space in unmitigated darkness. For this and 
other reasons no peon was ever permitted to ride on 
the platform with an American. Twelve hundred 
feet down we stepped out into a winding, rock gallery 
nearly six feet wide and high, where fourteen natives 
were loading rock and mud into iron dump-cars and 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 65 

pushing them to a near-by chute. Even at this 
depth flies were thick. A facetious boss asserted 
they hatched on the peons. My task here was to 
" sacar muestras " — " take samples," as it was called 
in English. From each car as it passed I snatched 
a handful of mud and small broken rock and thrust 
it into a sack that later went to the assay office to 
show what grade of ore the vein was producing. 

Once an hour I descended to a hole far beneath by 
a rope ladder, life depending on a spike driven in the 
rock above and a secure handhold, for the handful of 
" pay dirt " two peons were grubbing down out of a 
lower veta, a long narrow alleyway of soft earth and 
small stones that stretched away into the interior of 
the mountain between solid walls of rock. No inex- 
perienced man would have supposed this mud worth 
more than any other. But silver does not come out 
of the earth in minted dollars. 

In the mine the peons wore their hats, a consider- 
able protection against falling rocks, but were other- 
wise naked but for their sandals and a narrow strip 
of once white cloth between their legs, held by a string 
around the waist. Some were well-built, though all 
were small, and in the concentrated patch of light the 
play of their muscles through the light-brown skins 
was fascinating. Working thus naked seemed so 
much more dangerous ; the human form appeared so 
much more feeble and soft, delving unclothed in the 
fathomless, rocky earth. Many a man was marked 



66 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

here and there with long deep scars. It was notice- 
able how character, habits, dissipation, which show 
so plainly in the face, left but little sign on the rest 
of the body, which remained for the most part smooth 
and unwrinkled. 

The peons were more than careless. All day long 
dynamite was tossed carelessly back and forth about 
me. A man broke up three or four sticks of it at a 
time, wrapped them in paper, and beat the mass into 
the form of a ball on a rock at my feet. Miners 
grow so accustomed to this that they note it, if at 
all, with complete indifference, often working and 
serenely smoking seated on several hundred pounds 
of explosives. One peon of forty in this gang had 
lost his entire left arm in a recent explosion, yet he 
handled the dangerous stuff as carelessly as ever. 
Several others were mutilated in lesser degrees. 
They depend on charms and prayers to their favor- 
ite saint rather than on their own precautions. 
Every few minutes the day through came the cry: 
" 'Sta pegado ! " that sent us skurrying a few feet 
away until a dull, deafening explosion brought down 
a new section of the vein. Not long before, there had 
been a cave-in just beyond where we were working, 
and the several men imprisoned there had not been 
rescued, so that now and then a skull and portions 
of skeleton came down with the rock. The peons had 
first balked at this, but the superintendent had told 
them the bones were merely strange shapes of ore. 




A 



Drilling with compressed-air drills in a mine "heading" 




As each car passed I snatched a sample of its ore 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 69 

ordered them to break up the skulls and throw 
them in with the rest, and threatened to discharge and 
blackball any man who talked of the matter. 

By law a Mexican injured in the mine could not 
be treated on the spot, but must be first carried to 
Guanajuato — often dying on the way — to be ex- 
amined by the police and then brought back to the 
mine hospital. Small hurts were of slight impor- 
tance to the peons. During my first hour below, a 
muddy rock fell down the front of a laborer, scrap- 
ing the skin off his nose, deeply scratching his chest 
and thighs, and causing his toes to bleed, but he 
merely swore a few round oaths and continued his 
work. The hospital doctors asserted that the peon 
has not more than one fourth the physical sensitive- 
ness of civilized persons. Many a one allowed a 
finger to be amputated without a word, and as chloro- 
form is expensive the surgeon often replaced it with 
a long draught of mescal or tequila, the native 
whiskies. 

Outwardly the peons were very deferential to white 
men. I could rarely get a sentence from them, 
though they chattered much among themselves, with 
a constant sprinkling of obscenity. They had a com- 
plete language of whistles by which they warned each 
other of an approaching "jefe," exchanged varied 
information, and even entered into discussion of the 
alleged characteristics of their superiors in their 
very presence without being understood by the un- 



70 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

initiated. Frequently, too, amid the rumble of the 
" veta madre " pouring down her treasures, some for- 
mer Broadway favorite that had found its way grad- 
ually to the theater of Guanajuato sounded weirdly 
through the gallery, as it was whistled by some naked 
peon behind a loaded car. A man speaking only the 
pure Castilian would have had some difficulty in un- 
derstanding many of the mine terms. Many Indian 
words had crept into the common language, such as 
" chiquihuite " for basket. 

Some seventy-five cars passed me during the morn- 
ing. Under supervision the peons worked at moder- 
ately good speed ; indeed, they compared rather fa- 
vorably with the rough American laborers with whom 
I had recently toiled in railroad gangs, in a stone- 
quarry of Oklahoma, and the cotton-fields of Texas. 
The endurance of these fellows living on corn and 
beans is remarkable; they were as superior to the 
Oriental coolie as their wages to the latter's eight or 
ten cents a day. In this case, as the world over, the 
workmen earned about what he was paid, or rather 
succeeded in keeping his capacity down to the wages 
paid him. Many galleries of the mine were " worked 
on contract," and almost all gangs had their self- 
chosen leader. A peon with a bit more standing in 
the community than his fellows, wearing something 
or other to suggest his authority and higher place in 
the world — such perhaps as the pink shirt the 
haughty "jefecito" beside me sported — appeared 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 71 

with twelve or more men ready for work and was 
given a section and paid enough to give his men from 
fifty to eighty cents a day each and have something 
over a dollar left for himself. Miners' wages vary 
much throughout Mexico, from twelve dollars a 
month to two a day in places no insuperable distances 
apart. Conditions also differ greatly, according to 
my experienced compatriots. The striking and 
booting of the workmen, common in some mines, was 
never permitted in " Pingiiico." In Pachuca, for ex- 
ample, this was said to be the universal practice ; 
while in the mines of Chihuahua it would have been 
as dangerous as to do the same thing to a stick of 
dynamite. Here the peon's manner was little short 
of obsequious outwardly, yet one had the feeling that 
in crowds they were capable of making trouble and 
those who had fallen upon " gringoes " in the region 
had despatched their victims thoroughly, leaving them 
mutilated and robbed even of their clothing. The 
charming part of it all was one could never know 
which of these slinking fellows was a bandit by avoca- 
tion and saving up his unvented anger for the boss 
who ordered him about at his labors. 

It felt pleasant, indeed, to bask in the sun a half 
hour after dinner before descending again. Toward 
five I tied and tagged the sacks of samples and fol- 
lowed them, on peon backs, to the shaft and to the 
world above with its hot and cold shower-bath, and 
the Chinaman's promise, thanks to the proximity of 



72 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Irapuato, of " stlaybelly pie." Though the Ameri- 
can force numbered several of those fruitless in- 
dividuals that drift in and out of all mining communi- 
ties, it was on the whole of rather high caliber. Be- 
sides " Sully the Pug," a mere human animal, hairy 
and muscular as a bear, and two " Texicans," as 
those born in the States of some Mexican blood and 
generally a touch of foreign accent are called, there 
were two engineers who lived with their " chinitas," 
or illiterate mestizo Mexican wives and broods of 
peon children down in the valley below the dump- 
heap. Caste lines were not lacking even among the 
Americans in the " camp," as these call Guanajuato 
and its mining environs. More than one complained 
that those who married Mexican girls of unsullied 
character and even education were rated " squaw- 
men " and more or less ostracized by their fellow 
countrymen, and especially country-women, while 
the man who " picked up an old rounder from the 
States " was looked upon as an equal. The speech 
of all Mexico is slovenly from the Castilian point of 
view. Still more so was that of both the peon and 
the Americans, who copied the untutored tongue of 
the former, often ignorant of its faults, and gener- 
ally not in the least anxious to improve, nor indeed 
to get any other advantage from the country except 
the gold and silver they could dig out of it. Labor- 
ers and bosses commonly used " pierra " for piedra ; 
" sa' pa' fuera " for to leave the mine, " croquesi " 



r 




Working a "heading" by hand 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 75 

for I believe so, commonly ignorant even of the fact 
that this is not a single word. In the mess-hall were 
heard strange mixtures of the two languages, as 
when a man rising to answer some call shouted over 
his shoulder: "Juan, deja mi pie alone!" 
Thanks to much peon intercourse, almost all the 
Americans had an unconsciously patronizing air even 
to their fellows, as many a pedagogue comes to ad- 
dress all the world in the tone of the schoolroom. 
The Mexican, like the Spaniard, never laughs at the 
most atrocious attempts at his tongue by foreigners, 
and even the peons were often extremely quick-witted 
in catching the idea from a few mispronounced words. 

" The man with the hair ," I said one day, in 

describing a workman I wished summoned; and not 
for the moment recalling the Castilian for curly, I 
twirled my fingers in the air. 

" Chino ! " cried at least a half-dozen peons in the 
same breath. 

Small wonder the Mexican considers the " gringo " 
rude. An American boss would send a peon to fetch 
his key or cigarettes, or on some equally important 
errand; the workman would run all the way up hill 
and down again in the rarified air, removing his hat 
as he handed over the desired article, and the average 
man from the States would not so much as grunt his 
thanks. 

The engineers on whom our lives depended as often 
as we descended into or mounted from the mine, had 



hi 



76 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

concocted and posted in the engine-room the follow- 
ing " ten commandments " : 

" NOTICE TO VISITORS AND OTHERS 

" Article 1. Be seated on the platform. It is 
too large for the engineer anyway. 

" Art. 2. Spit on the floor. We like to clean 
up after you. 

" Art. 3. Talk to the engineer while he is run- 
ning. There is no responsibility to his job. 

" Art. 4. If the engineer does not know his busi- 
ness, please tell him. He will appreciate it. 

" Art. 5. Ask him as many questions as you like. 
He is paid to answer them. 

" Art. 6. Please handle all the bright work. 
We have nothing to do but clean it. 

"Art. 7. Don't spit on the ceiling. We have 
lost the ladder. 

" Art. 8. Should the engineer look angry don't 
pay any attention to him. He is harmless. 

" Art. 9. If you have no cigarettes take his. 
They grow in his garden. 

"Art. 10. If he is not entertaining, report him 
to the superintendent and he will be fired at once." 

On the second day the scene of my operations was 
changed to the eighth level, a hundred feet below that 
of the first. It was a long gallery winding away 
through the mountain, and connecting a mile beyond 
with another shaft opening on another hill, so that 
the heavy air was tempered by a constant mild breeze. 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 77 

Side shafts just large enough for the ore-cars to 
pass, pierced far back into the mountain at frequent 
intervals. Back in these it was furnace hot. From 
them the day-gang took out 115 car-loads, though 
the chute was blocked now and then by huge rocks 
that must be " shot " by a small charge of dynamite 
stuck on them, a new way of " shooting the chutes " 
that was like striking the ear-drums with a club. 

The peons placed in each gallery either a cross or 
a lithograph of the Virgin in a shrine made of a 
dynamite-box, and kept at least one candle always 
burning before it. In the morning it was a common 
sight to see several appear with a bunch of fresh- 
picked flowers to set up before the image. Most of 
the men wore a rosary or charm about the neck, 
which they did not remove even when working naked, 
and all crossed themselves each time they entered the 
mine. Not a few chanted prayers while the cage was 
descending. As often as they passed the gallery- 
shrine, they left off for an instant the vilest oaths, 
in which several boys from twelve to fourteen ex- 
celled, to snatch off their hats to the Virgin, then in- 
stantly took up their cursing again. Whenever I 
left the mine they begged the half-candle I had left, 
and set it up with the rest. Yet they had none of the 
touchiness of the Hindu about their superstitions, 
and showed no resentment whatever even when a 
" gringo " stopped to light his cigarette at their im- 
provised " altars." 



78 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Trusted miners hired to search the others for 
stolen ore as they leave the shaft were sometimes 
waylaid on the journey home and beaten almost or 
quite to death. Once given a position of authority, 
they were harsher with their own kind than were the 
white men. The scarred and seared old " Pingiiico " 
searcher, who stood at his block three times each 
twenty-four hours, had already killed three men who 
thus attacked him. Under no provocation whatever 
would the peons fight underground, but lay for their 
enemies only outside. A shift-boss in a neighboring 
mine remained seven weeks below, having his food 
sent down to him, and continued to work daily with 
miners who had sworn to kill him once they caught 
him on earth. One of our engineers had long been 
accustomed at another mine to hand his revolver to 
the searcher when the shift appeared and to arm him- 
self with a heavy club. One day the searcher gave 
the superintendent a " tip," and when the hundred 
or more were lined up they were suddenly commanded 
to take off their borrachas. A gasp of dismay 
sounded, but all hastily snatched off their sandals 
and something like a bushel of high-grade ore in thin 
strips lay scattered on the ground. But a few morn- 
ings later the searcher was found dead half way be- 
tween the mine and his home. 

Some of the mines round about Guanajuato were 
in a most chaotic state, especially those of individual 
ownership. The equipment was often so poor that 




■■■I . . ■■■■ 

Peon miners being searched for stolen ore as they leave the mine 




Bricks of gold and silver ready for shipment, 
thing like $1250 



Each is worth some- 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 81 

fatal accidents were common, deaths even resulting 
from rocks falling down the shafts. Among our 
engineers was one who had recently come from a 
mine where during two weeks' employment he pulled 
out from one to four corpses daily, until " it got so 
monotonous " he resigned. In that same mine it was 
customary to lock in each shift until the relieving one 
arrived, and many worked four or five shifts, thirty- 
two to forty hours without a moment of rest, swal- 
lowing a bit of food now and then with a sledge in 
one hand. " High-graders," as ore-thieves are 
called, were numerous. The near-by " Sirena " mine 
was reputed to have in its personnel more men who 
lived by stealing ore than honest workmen. There 
ran the story of a new boss in a mine so near ours 
that we could hear its blasting from our eighth level, 
long dull thuds that seemed to run through the moun- 
tain like a shudder through a human body, who was 
making his first underground inspection when his 
light suddenly went out and he felt the cold barrel 
of a revolver against his temple. A peon voice 
sounded in the darkness close to his ear: 

" No te muevas, hi jo de , si quieres vivir ! " 

Another light was struck and he made out some 
twenty peons, each with a sack of " high-grade," 
and was warned to take his leave on the double-quick 
and not to look around on penalty of a worse fate 
than that of Lot's wife. 

Bandit gangs were known to live in out-of-the-way 



82 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

corners of several mines, bringing their blankets and 
tortillas with them and making a business of stealing 
ore. Not even the most experienced mining engineer 
could more quickly recognize " pay dirt " than the 
peon population of Guanajuato vicinity. 

Though he is obsequious enough under ordinary 
circumstances, the mine peon often has a deep- 
rooted hatred of the American, which vents itself 
chiefly in cold silence, unless opportunity makes some 
more effective way possible. Next on his black-list 
comes the Spaniard, who is reputed a heartless 
usurer who long enjoyed protection under Diaz. 
Third, perhaps, come the priests, though these are 
endured as a necessary evil, as we endure a bad 
government. The padre of Calderon drifted up to 
the mine one day to pay his respects and drink the 
mine health in good Scotch whisky. Gradually he 
brought the conversation around to the question of 
disobedience among the peons, and summed up his 
advice to the Americans in a vehement explosion: 

" Fine them ! Fine them often, and much ! 

" Of course," he added, as he prepared to leave, 
" you know that by the laws of Mexico and the Santa 
Iglesia all such fines go to the church." 

Intercourse between the mine officials and native 
authorities was almost always sure to make it worth 
while to linger in the vicinity. My disrespectful 
fellow countrymen were much given to mix in with 
the most courteous Spanish forms of speech asides 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 83 

in English which it was well the pompous official na- 
tives did not understand. I reached the office one 
day to find the chief of police just arrived to collect 
for his services in guarding the money brought out 
on pay-day. 

" Ah, senor mio," cried the superintendent, " Y 
como esta usted? La familia buena? Y los hijos — 
I'll slip the old geaser his six bones and let him be on 
his way — Oh, si, sefior. Como no ? Con mu- 
chisimo gusto — and there goes six of our good 
bucks and four bits and — Pues adios, muy sefior 
mio ! Vaya bien ! — If only you break your worth- 
less old neck on the way home — Adios pues ! " 

After the shower-bath it was as much worth while 
to stroll up over the ridge back of the camp and 
watch the night settle down over this upper-story 
world. Only on the coast of Cochinchina have I 
seen sunsets to equal those in this altitude. Each 
one was different. To-night it stretched entirely 
across the saw-toothed summits of the western hills 
in a narrow, pinkish-red streak ; to-morrow the play 
of colors on mountains and clouds shot blood-red, 
fading to saffron yellow growing an ever-thicker 
gray down to the horizon, with the unrivaled blue of 
the sky overhead, all shifting and changing with 
every moment, would be hopelessly beyond the power 
of words. Often rain was falling in a spot or two 
far to the west, and there the clouds were jet black. 
In one place well above the horizon was perhaps a 



84 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

brilliant pinkish patch of reflected sun, and every- 
thing else an immensity of clouded sky running from 
Confederate gray above to a blackish-blue that 
blended with range upon range to the uttermost dis- 
tance. 

There was always a peculiar stillness over all 
the scene. Groups of sandaled mine peons wound 
noiselessly away, a few rods apart, along undulating 
trails, the red of their sarapes and the yellow of their 
immense hats giving the predominating hue. In 
the vast landscape was much green, though more 
gray of outcropping rocks. Here and there a lonely 
telegraph wire struck off dubiously across the rug- 
ged country. Rocks as large as houses hung on the 
great hillsides, ready to roll down and destroy at the 
slightest movement of the earth, like playthings left 
by careless giant children. Along some rocky path 
far down in the nearer valley a small horse of the 
patient Mexican breed, under its picturesque, huge- 
hatted rider, galloped sure-footed up and down steep 
faces of rock. Cargadores bent half double, with 
a rope across their brows, came straining upward 
to the mine. Bands of peons released from their un- 
derground labors paused here and there on the way 
home to wager cigarettes on which could toss a stone 
nearest the next mud puddle. Flocks of goats wan- 
dered in the growing dusk about swift rocky moun- 
tain flanks. Farther away was a rocky ridge beaten 
with narrow, bare, crisscross trails, and beyond, the 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 86 

old Valenciana mine on the flanks of the jagged 
range shutting off Dolores Hidalgo, appearing so 
near in this clear air of the heights that it seemed a 
man could throw a stone there ; yet down in the val- 
ley between lay all Guanajuato, the invisible, and 
none might know how many bandits were sleeping 
out the day in their lurking-places among the wild, 
broken valleys and gorges the view embraced. 
Down in its rock-tumbled valley spread the scattered 
town of Calderon, and the knell of its tinny old 
church bells came drifting up across the divide on the 
sturdy evening breeze, tinged with cold, that seemed 
to bring the night with it, so silently and coolly did 
it settle down. The immense plain and farther 
mountains remained almost visible in the starlight, 
in the middle distance the lamps of Silao, and near 
the center of the half-seen picture those of Irapuato, 
while far away a faint glow in the sky marked the 
location of the city of Leon. 

Excitement burst upon the mess-table one night. 
Rival politicians were to contend the following Sun- 
day for the governorship of the State, and the 
" liberal " candidate had assured the peons that he 
would treble their wages and force the company to 
give them full pay during illness, and that those who 
voted for his rival were really casting ballots for 
" los gringos " who had stolen away their mines. All 
this was, of course, pure campaign bunco ; as a mat- 
ter of fact the lowest wages in all the mines of Mex- 



86 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

ico were in those belonging to the then " liberal " 
President of the republic, and accident pay would 
have caused these insensible fellows to drop rocks on 
themselves to enjoy its benefits. For several morn- 
ings threatening political posters had appeared on 
the walls of the company buildings. But this time 
word came that " liberal " posters had been stuck 
up in the galleries of the mine itself. The boss 
sprang to his feet, and without even sending for his 
revolver went down into the earth. An hour or more 
later he reappeared with the remnants of the posters. 
Though the mine was populated with peons and there 
was not then another American below ground, they 
watched him tear down the sheets without other 
movement than to cringe about him, each begging 
not to be believed guilty. Later a peon was charged 
with the deed and forever forbidden to work in 
the mines of the company. The superintendent 
threatened to discharge any employee who voted for 
the " liberal " candidate, and, though he could not of 
course know who did, their dread of punishment no 
doubt kept many from voting at all. 

Work in the mine never ceased. Even as we fell 
asleep the engine close at hand panted constantly, 
the mild clangor of the blacksmith-shop continued 
unbroken, cars of rock were dumped every few min- 
utes under the swarming stars, the mine pulse beat 
unchanging, and far down beneath our beds hundreds 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 87 

of naked peons were still tearing incessantly at the 
rocky entrails of the earth. 

Though the mine throbbed on, I set off on sunny 
Sunday morning to walk to town and the weekly 
ball game. It was just warm enough for a summer 
coat, a breeze blew as at sea, an occasional telephone 
pole was singing as with contentment with life in this 
perfect climate. Groups of brownish-gray donkeys 
with loads on their backs passed me or crawled along 
far-away trails, followed by men in tight white 
trousers, their striped and gay-colored sarapes about 
their bodies and their huge hats atop. Over all was 
a Sunday stillness, broken only by the occasional 
bark of a distant dog or a cockcrow that was almost 
musical as it was borne by on the wind. Everywhere 
were mountains piled into the sky. Valenciana, 
where so many Spaniards, long since gone to what- 
ever reward awaited them, waxed rich and built a 
church now golden brown with age, sat on its slope 
across the valley down in which no one would have 
guessed huddled a city of some 60,000 inhabitants. 
Much nearer and a bit below drowsed the old town 
of Calderon, home of many of our peons, a bright 
red blanket hung over a stone wall giving a splash 
of brilliancy to the vast stretch of grayish, dull- 
brown, and thirsty green. The road wound slowly 
down and ever down, until the gullies grew warmer as 
the rising mountains cut off the breeze and left the 



88 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

sun in undisputed command. Along the way were 
flowers uncountable, chiefly large, white, lily-like 
blossoms growing on a bush, then thick patches of 
orange-yellow. Horsemen, Mexicans on burros, 
peon men, women, and children afoot were legion. 
There were no Americans, though I passed one huge 
Negro with a great black beard who gave me " Good 
morning " from his horse in the tone of a man who 
had not met an equal before in some time. At length 
appeared the emerald-green patch of the upper 
Presa, with its statue of Hidalgo, and the cafe-au- 
lait pond that stores the city's water, and over the 
parapet of which hung guanajuatenses watching 
with wonder the rowboat of the American hospital 
doctor, the only water craft the great majority of 
them had ever seen. 

A natural amphitheater encloses the ball-ground 
in which were gathered the wives of Americans, in 
snowy white, to watch a game between teams made 
up chiefly of " gringoes " of the mines, my one-time 
classmate still at short-stop, as in our schoolboy 
days, thanks to which no doubt Guanajuato held the 
baseball championship of Mexico. Like the English 
officials of India, the Americans in high places here 
were noticeable for their youth, and at least here on 
the ball-ground for their democracy, known to all 
by their boyhood nicknames yet held almost in rev- 
erence by the Mexican youths that filled in the less 
important positions. At the club after the game the 




In a natural amphitheater of Guanajuato the American miners of 
the region gather on Sundays for a game of baseball 




I. 



Some of the peons under my charge about to leave the mine 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 91 

champion Mexican player discoursed on the certainty 
of ultimate American intervention and expressed his 
own attitude with : 

" Let it come, for I am not a politician but a 
baseball player." 

It was election day, and I passed several door- 
ways, among them that of the company stable, in 
which a half-dozen old fossils in their most solemn 
black garb crouched dreamily over wooden tables 
with registers, papers, and ink bottles before them. 
Now and then a frightened peon slunk up hat in hand 
to find whether they wished him to vote, and how, or 
to see if perhaps he had not voted already — by ab- 
sent treatment. The manager of one of the mines 
had come into the office of the jefe politico of his dis- 
trict the night before and found the ballots already 
made out for the " liberal " candidate. He tore 
them up and sent his own men to watch the election, 
with the result that there was a strong majority in 
that precinct in favor of the candidate more pleas- 
ing to the mine owners. The pulquerias and saloons 
of the peons had been closed, but not the clubs and 
resorts of the white men. In one of these I sat with 
the boss, watching him play a game of stud poker. 
A dissipated young American, who smoked a cigar 
and a cigarette at the same time, was most in evi- 
dence, a half Comanche Indian of an utterly im- 
passive countenance did the dealing, and fortunes 
went up and down amid the incessant rattle of chips 



92 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

far into the morning. At three the boss broke 
away, nine dollars to the good, while the proprietor 
of the place ended with an enormous heap of chips 
in front of him; another American, making out to 
him a check for $90, and calling for his horse, rode 
back to his mine to earn it — the shoes of the horse 
clanking on the cobbles in the silence of the night 
and passing now and then a policeman's lantern set 
in the middle of the street, while that official hud- 
dled in his white uniform in a dark corner, ostensi- 
bly keeping guard. 

On another such a day I turned back about dusk 
up the gorge on the return to the mine. The upper 
park where the band had played earlier was now 
completely deserted. The road was nearly five miles 
long; the trail, sheer up the wild tumble of moun- 
tains before me, little more than two. This was 
vaguely reputed dangerous, but I was not inclined 
to take the rumor seriously. 

Black night fell. Soon I came upon the vanguard 
of the day-shift from " Pingiiico," straggling down 
the face of the mountain, shouting and whistling to 
each other in their peculiar language. Some car- 
ried torches that flashed along the mountain wall 
above me and threw long quaint shadows of the tight- 
trousered legs. The grade was more than forty- 
five degrees, with much slipping and sliding on un- 
seen rocks. Two or three groups had passed when 
one of the men recognized me and with a " Buenas 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 93 

noches, jefe!" insisted on giving me the torch he 
carried, a mine candle with a cloth wrapped around 
it as a protection in the strong wind. I had soon to 
cast this away, as it not only threatened to burn my 
hand but left the eyes unable to pierce the surround- 
ing wall of darkness. In the silence of the night 
there came to mind the assertion of by no means 
our most timorous engineer, that he never passed 
over this trail after dark without carrying his re- 
volver cocked in his hand. My fellow countrymen 
of the region all wore huge " six-shooters " with a 
large belt of cartridges always in sight, less for use 
than the salutary effect of having them visible, in 
itself a real protection. Conditions in Mexico had 
led me to go armed for the first time in my travels ; 
or more exactly, to carry one of the " vest pocket 
automatics " so much in vogue — on advertising 
pages — in that season. My experienced fellow 
Americans refused to regard this weapon seriously. 
One had made the very fitting suggestion that each 
bullet should bear a tag with the devise, " You 're 
shot ! " An aged " roughneck " of a half-century 
of Mexican residence had put it succinctly : " Yer 

travel scheme 's all right ; but I '11 be if I 

like the gat you carry." However, such as it was, 
I drew it now and held it ready for whatever it might 
be called upon to attempt. 

A half hour of heavy climbing brought me to the 
summit, with a strong cool breeze and a splendid 



94 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

view of the spreading lights of Guanajuato in the 
narrow winding gully far below. The trail wound 
round a peak and reached the first scattered huts of 
Calderon just as a number of shots sounded not far 
away. These increased until all the dogs for miles 
around took up the hue and cry. The shots multi- 
plied, with much shouting and uproar, soon sound- 
ing on both sides and ahead and behind me, while 
the whistling language shrilled from every gully and 
hillside. Evidently drunken peons were harmlessly 
celebrating their Sunday holiday, but the shots 
sounded none the less weirdly out of the black night 
as I stumbled on over the rocky, tumbled country, 
for the only smooth way thereabouts was the Milky 
Way faintly seen overhead. Gradually the shoot- 
ing and shouting drifted behind me and died out as 
I surmounted the last knoll and descended to bed. 
It was only at breakfast next morning that I learned 
I had serenely strolled through a pitched battle be- 
tween bandits that haunted the recesses of the moun- 
tains about Calderon and the town which, led by 
its jefe politico, had finally won the bout with four 
outlaw corpses to its credit. It was my luck not to 
have even a bullet-hole through my cap to prove the 
story. There were often two or three such battles 
a week in the vicinity. 

That morning I was given a new job. The boss 
led the way, candle in hand, a half mile back through 
the bowels of the mountain, winding with the swing- 




The easiest way to carry a knapsack — on a peon's back 




The ore thieves of Peregrina being led away to prison 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 97 

ing of the former ore vein. This alone was enough 
to get hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind- 
alley branches. Now and then we came upon an- 
other shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole 
a few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far 
down which came up the falsetto voices and the 
stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of heavy 
hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only 
started. Far back in the gallery we took another 
hoist and descended some two hundred feet more, 
then wound off again through the mountain by more 
labyrinthian burrowings in the rock, winding, un- 
dulating passages, often so low we must crawl on 
hands and knees, with no other light than the flicker- 
ing candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, 
copper-colored beings ; the shadows giving them 
often fiendish faces and movements, until we could 
easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's 
imagination. In time we came to a ladder leading 
upward into a narrow dark hole, and when the lad- 
der ended we climbed some forty feet higher on our 
bellies up a ledge of rock to another heading, along 
which we made our way another hundred yards or 
more to where a dozen naked peons were operating 
compressed-air drills ; then wormed our way like 
snakes over the resultant debris to the present end of 
the passage where more peons were drilling by hand, 
one man holding a bar of iron a few feet long which 
another was striking with a five-pound sledge that 



98 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

luckily never missed its mark. This was indeed 
working in Mexico. It would have been difficult to 
get farther into it; and a man could not but dully 
wonder if he would ever get out again. 

We were evidently very close to the infernal 
regions. Here, indeed, would have been a splendid 
setting for an orthodox hell. Peons whose only gar- 
ment was the size of a postcard, some even with their 
hats off, glistened all over their brown bodies as un- 
der a shower-bath. In five minutes I had sweat com- 
pletely through my garments, in ten I could wring 
water out of my j acket ; drops fell regularly at about 
half-second intervals from the end of my nose and 
chin. The dripping sweat formed puddles beneath 
the toilers, the air was so scarce and second-hand 
every breath was a deep gasp ; nowhere a sign of 
exit, as if we had been walled up in this narrow, low- 
ceiled, jagged-rock passageway for all time. 

My work here was to take samples from the 
" roof." A grinning peon who called himself 
" Bruno Basques " (Vasquez) followed me about, 
holding his hat under the hammer with which I 
chipped bits of rock from above, back and forth 
across the top of the tunnel every few feet. The 
ore ran very high in grade here, the vein being some 
six feet of whitish rocky substance between sheer walls 
of ordinary rock. It struck one most forcibly, this 
strange inquisitiveness of man that had caused him 
to prowl around inside the earth like a mole, looking 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 99 

for a peculiar kind of soil or stone which no one at 
first sight could have guessed was of any particular 
value. The peons, smeared all over with the drip- 
pings of candle-grease, worked steadily for all the 
heat and stuffiness. Indeed, one could not but won- 
der at the amount of energy they sold for a day's 
wages ; though of course their industry was partly 
due to my " gringo " presence. We addressed them 
as inferiors, in the " tu " form and with the generic 
title " hombre," or, more exactly, in the case of most 
of the American bosses, " hum-bray." The white 
man who said " please " to them, or even showed 
thanks in any way, such as giving them a cigarette, 
lost caste in their eyes as surely as with a butler one 
might attempt to treat as a man. I tried it on 
Bruno, and he almost instantly changed from obse- 
quiousness to near-insolence. When I had put him 
in his place again, he said he was glad I spoke 
Spanish, for so many " jefes " had pulled his hair 
and ears and slapped him in the face because he did 
not understand their " strange talk." He did not 
mention this in any spirit of complaint, but merely 
as a curious fact and one of the many visitations 
fate sees fit to send those of her children unluckily 
born peons. His jet black hair was so thick that 
small stones not only did not hurt his head as they 
fell from under my hammer, but remained buried in 
his thatch, so that nearly as many samples were 
taken from this as from the roof of the passage. 



100 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Thus the sweat-dripping days passed, without a 
hint of what might be going on in the world far 
above, amid the roar and pounding of air and hand- 
drills, the noisy falling of masses of rock as these 
broke it loose, the constant ringing of shovels, the 
rumble of iron ore-cars on their thread-like rails, 
cries of " 'sta pegado ! " quickly followed by the 
stunning, ear-splitting dynamite blast, screams of 
" No vas echar ! " as some one passed beneath an 
opening above, of " Ahora si ! " when he was out of 
danger; the shrill warning whistling of the peons 
echoing back and forth through the galleries and 
labyrinthian side tunnels, as the crunch of shoes 
along the track announced the approach of some 
boss ; the shouting of the peons " throwing " a laden 
car along the track through the heavy smoke-laden 
air, so thick with the smell of powder and thin with 
oxygen that even experienced bosses developed rag- 
ing headaches, and the Beau Brummel secretary of 
the company fell down once with dizziness and went 
to bed after the weekly inspection. 

When the first day was done I carried the ten 
sacks of samples — via Bruno's shoulders — through 
the labyrinth of corridors and shafts to be loaded on 
a car and pushed to the main shaft, where blew a 
veritable sea-breeze that gave those coming from 
the red-hot pockets a splendid chance for catching 
cold which few overlooked. In the bodega, or un- 
derground office, I changed my dripping garments 







One of Mexico's countless "armies" 




Vendors of strawberries at the station of Irapuato 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 103 

for dry ones, but waited long for the broken-down 
motor to lift me again finally to pure air. In the 
days that followed I was advanced to the rank of 
car-boss in this same level, and found enough to do 
and more in keeping the tricky car-men moving. A 
favorite ruse was to tip over a car on its way to the 
chute and to grunt and groan over it for a half- 
hour pretending to lift it back on the rails ; or to 
tuck away far back in some abandoned " lead " the 
cars we needed, until I went on tours of investiga- 
tion and ferreted them out. 

During the last days of October I drew my car- 
boss wages and set out to follow the ore after it left 
the mine. From the underground chutes it was 
drawn up to the surface in the iron buckets, dumped 
on " gridleys " (screens made of railroad rails sep- 
arated a like width) after weighing, broken up and 
the worthless rock thrown out on the " dump," a 
great artificial hill overhanging the valley below and 
threatening to bury the little native houses huddled 
down in it. A toy Baldwin locomotive dragged the 
ore trains around the hill to the noisy stamp-mill 
spreading through another valley, with a village 
of adobe huts overgrown with masses of purple flow- 
ers and at the bottom a plain of white sand waste 
from which the " values " had been extracted. The 
last samples I had taken assayed nine pounds of 
silver and 23 grams of gold to the ton. The car- 
loads were dumped into bins at the top of the mill. 



104? TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

The nature of the country had been taken advantage 
of in the building, which hung twelve stories high on 
the steep hillside, making gravitation the chief means 
of transportation during the refining process. 
Rocks were screened into one receptacle and broken 
up by hand. The finer stuff went direct to the 
stamps. Stones of ordinary size were spread by 
machinery on a broad leather belt that passed three 
peon women, who picked out and tossed away the 
oreless stones. Their movements were leisurely, but 
they were sharp-eyed and very few worthless bits got 
by the three of them. A story below, the picked ma- 
terial went under deafening stamps weighing tons 
and striking several blows a second, while water was 
turned in to soften the material. This finally ran 
down another story in liquid form into huge cylin- 
ders where it was rolled and rolled again and at last 
flowed on, smelling like mortar or wet lime, onto 
platforms of zinc constantly shaking as with the 
ague and with water steadily flowing over them. 
Workmen about the last and most concentrated of 
these were locked in rooms made of chicken-wire. 
Below, the stuff flowed into enormous vats, like 
giants' washtubs, and was stirred and watered here 
for several days until the " values " had settled and 
were drawn off at the bottom. There were three 
stories, or some thirty, of these immense vats. The 
completed process left these full of white sand which 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 105 

a pair of peons spent several days shoveling out and 
carrying down into the valley. 

The " values " were next run down into smaller 
vats and treated with zinc shavings, precipitating a 
50 per cent, pure metal, black in color, which was 
put into melting-pots in a padlocked room overseen 
by an American. Here it was cast in large brick 
molds, these being knocked off and the metal left to 
slack, after which it was melted again and finally 
turned into gray-black blocks of the size and form 
of a paving-brick, 85 per cent, pure, about as heavy 
as the average lady would care to lift, and worth 
something like $1250 each. Two or four of these 
were tied on the back of a donkey and a train of them 
driven under guard to the town office, whence they 
were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into 
those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles 
for the vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by 
revolutionists. On this same ground the old colonial 
Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled patio, 
treat it with mercury, and drive mules round and 
round in it for weeks until they pocketed whatever 
was left to them after paying the king's fifth and 
the tithes of the church. 

My rucksack on the back of a peon — and it is 
astonishing how much more easily one's possessions 
carry in that fashion ; as if it were indeed that au- 
tomatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated 



106 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

inventing — I set off to the neighboring mine of 
" Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed to carry 
anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain 
at this half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. 
Being drawn out, he grew quite cheery on this new 
fashion of carrying — " when the load is not much." 
In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone 
sweeping across the high country, the trail lay across 
tumbled stretches of rocky ground, range behind 
range of mountains beyond and a ruined stone hut 
or corral here and there carrying the memory back 
to Palestine. For a half hour we had Guanajuato 
in full sight in its narrow gully far below. Many 
donkeys pattered by under their loads of encinal 
fagots, the ragged, expressionless drivers plodding 
silently at their heels. 

Ahead grew the roar of " Peregrina's " stamp-mill, 
and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung 
village. According to the manager, I had chosen 
well the time of my coming, for there was " some- 
thing doing." We strolled about town until he had 
picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican, 
built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veri- 
table haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a 
sworn friend of the mining company. With him we 
returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought 
up in the " zinc room," where the metal is cast into 
bricks. Here the stealing of ore by workmen is 
particularly prevalent, and even the searching by 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 107 

the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even 
the skimming off of the scum leaves the floor scat- 
tered with chips of silver with a high percentage of 
gold which even the American in charge cannot al- 
ways keep the men from concealing. Hence there 
occurs periodically the scene we were about to wit- 
ness. 

When the native workmen of the " zinc room " 
enter for the day, they are obliged to strip in one 
chamber and pass on to the next to put on their 
working clothes, reversing the process when they 
leave. To-day all five of them were herded together 
in one dressing-room, of which, the three of us being 
admitted, the door was locked. The jefe politico, 
as the government authority of the region, set about 
searching them, and as his position depended on the 
good-will of the powerful mining company, it was no 
perfunctory '* frisking." The ragged fellows were 
called up one by one and ordered to strip of blouses, 
shirts, and trousers, and even borrachas, their flat 
leather sandals, the jefe examining carefully even 
the seams of their garments. Indeed, he even 
searched the hairs of their bodies for filings of " high- 
grade." 

The men obeyed with dog-like alacrity, though 
three of them showed some inner emotion, whether 
of guilt, fear, or shame, it was hard to guess. Two 
had been carefully gone over without the discovery 
of anything incriminating, when the jefe suddenly 



108 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

snatched up the hat of the first and found in it a 
knotted handkerchief containing a scrap of pure 
metal some two inches long. From then on his luck 
increased. The fourth man had been fidgeting about, 
half disrobing before the order came, when all at 
once the local authority turned and picked up a 
piece of ore as large as a silver dollar, wrapped in 
paper, which the fellow had surreptitiously tossed 
away among a bunch of mats against the wall. The 
jefe cuffed him soundly and ordered him to take off 
his shoes — he was the only one of the five sporting 
that luxury — and discovered in the toe of one of 
them a still larger booty. The last of the group was 
a cheery little fellow barely four feet high, likable 
in spite of his ingrained lifetime lack of soap. He 
showed no funk, and when ordered to undress turned 
to the "gringo" manager with: "Me too, jefe?" 
Then he quickly stripped, proving himself not only 
honest but the biggest little giant imaginable. He 
had a chest like a wine-barrel and legs that resembled 
steel poles, weighed fifty-two kilos, yet according to 
the manager, of whom he was one of the trusties, 
frequently carried four-hundred-pound burdens up 
the long hill below the mine. The jefe found some- 
thing tied up in his old red cloth belt, but little Bar- 
rel-chest never lost his smile, and the suspicious lump 
proved to be a much-folded old chromo print of some 
saint. 

" What 's he got that for ? " asked the manager. 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 109 

" To save him from the devil," sneered the jefe, 
wadding it up and tossing it back at him. 

When he was dressed again the little giant was 
sent to town for policemen, a sign of confidence which 
seemed greatly to please him. For a half hour we 
smoked and joked and discussed, like so many cattle 
in the shambles, the three prisoners, two found guilty 
and the third suspected, who stood silent and 
motionless against the wall. Three policemen in 
shoddy uniforms, armed with clubs and enormous 
revolvers sticking out through their short coat-tails, 
at length appeared, of the same class and seeming 
little less frightened than the prisoners. They were 
ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals 
and stood clutching these and the tails of the red 
sarapes, when the jefe interrupted some anecdote to 
shout the Spanish version of: 

" What in are you waiting for ? " 

They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hur- 
ried their prisoners away to the cold, flea-ridden, 
stone calaboose of the town, where in all probability 
they lay several months before their case was even 
called up ; while the manager and I ascended to his 
veranda and flower-grown residence and sat down to 
a several course dinner served by a squad of solemn 
servants. As in many another land, it pays to be 
a white man in Mexico. 

Stealing is rarely a virtue. But it was not hard 
to put oneself in the place of these wretches and 



110 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

catch their point of view that made such thievery 
justifiable. As they saw it, these foreigners had 
made them go down into their own earth and dig 
out its treasures, paid them little for their labors, 
and searched them whenever they left that they 
should not keep even a little bit of it for themselves. 
Now they had made their own people shut them up 
because they had picked up a few dollars' worth of 
scraps left over from the great burro-loads of which, 
to their notion, the hated " gringoes " were robbing 
them. Like the workingmen of England, they were 
only " getting some of their own back." They were 
no doubt more " aficionados al pulque " and gam- 
bling than to their families, but so to some extent 
were the " gringoes " also, and they were by no 
means the only human beings who would succumb to 
the same temptation under the same circumstances. 
The ancient " Peregrina " mine was different from 
" Pingiiico." Here we entered by a level opening 
and walked down most of the two thousand feet, 
much of it by narrow, slimy, slippery, stone steps, 
in some places entirely worn away by the bare feet 
of the many generations of peons that as slaves to 
the Spaniards of colonial days used to carry the ore 
up on their backs from the very bottom of the mine. 
" Peregrina " mountain was almost another Mam- 
moth Cave, so enormous are the caverns that have 
been " stoped out " of it in the past four centuries. 
In many a place we could see even with several can- 




The wall of Guadalajara penitentiary against which prisoners are 

shot 




The liver-shaking stage-coach from Atequisa to Chapala 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 113 

dies only the ground underfoot and perhaps a bit of 
the nearest sidewall ; the rest was a dank, noiseless, 
blank space, seeming square miles in extent. For 
three hours we wandered up and down and in and 
out of huge unseen caves, now and then crawling up 
or down three or four hundred foot " stopes " on 
hands and knees, by ladders, stone steps, or toe- 
holes in the rock. Through it all it was raining 
much of the time in torrents — in the mine, that is, 
for outside the sun was shining brightly — with mud 
underfoot and streams of water running along much 
of the way; and, unlike the sweltering interior of 
" Pingiiico," there was a dank dungeon chill that 
reached the marrow of the bones. Even in the 
shafts which we descended in buckets, cold water 
poured down upon us, and, far from being naked, 
the miners wore all the clothing they possessed. 
Here the terror of the peons was an old American 
mine-boss rated " loco " among them, who went 
constantly armed with an immense and ancient re- 
volver, always loaded and reputed of " hair trigger," 
which he drew and whistled in the barrel whenever he 
wished to call a workman. A blaze crackling in the 
fireplace was pleasant during the evening in the man- 
ager's house, for " Peregrina " lies even higher above 
the sea than " Pingiiico " ; but even here by night or 
day the peons, and especially the women, went bare- 
foot and in thinnest garb. 

A native horse, none of which seem noted for their 



114* TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

speed, carried me out to the famous old mining town 
of La Luz, where the Spaniards first bagan digging 
in this region. The animal made little headway 
forward, but fully replaced this by the distance cov- 
ered up and down. To it a trot was evidently an 
endeavor to see how many times and how high it 
could jump into the air from the same spot. The 
ancient Aztecs, seeing us advancing upon them, 
would never have made the mistake of fancying man 
and horse parts of the same animal. Moreover, the 
pesky beast had an incurable predilection for tread- 
ing, like a small boy " showing off," the extreme edge 
of pathways at times not six inches from a sheer fall 
of from five hundred to a thousand feet down rock- 
faced precipices. 

Still it was a pleasant three-hour ride in the bril- 
liant sunshine, winding round and over the hills along 
pitching and tossing trails. Peons obsequiously 
lifted their hats when I passed, which they do not to 
a man afoot ; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble 
mountains and valleys, with deep-shadowed little 
gorges scolloped out of the otherwise sun-flooded 
landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching 
paths, down which the animal picked its way with 
ease and assurance, alternated with mighty climbs 
over a dozen rises, each of which I fancied the last. 

La Luz is a typical town of mountainous Mexico. 
A long, broken adobe village lies scattered along a 
precipitous valley, scores of " roads " and trails 



IN A MEXICAN MINE 115 

hedged with cactus wind and swoop and climb again 
away over steep hills and through deep barrancos, 
troops of peons and donkeys enlivening them ; flowers 
give a joyful touch, and patches of green and the 
climate help to make the place reminiscent of the 
more thickly settled portions of Palestine. From 
the town we could see plainly the city of Leon, 
fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less strik- 
ing than that from " Pingiiico," because of the range 
rising to cut it off in the middle distance. The 
mountains of all this region are dotted with round, 
white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of 
different mining properties. By Mexican law each 
must be visible from the adjoining two, and in this 
pitched and tumbled country this requires many. 

Beyond the village we found, about the old Span- 
ish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with 
loop-holed turrets for bandits and nitches for saints. 
These structures, as well as the waste dumped by 
the Spaniards, were being " repicked for values," 
and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the 
never-ending rumble of which sounded incessantly, 
like some distant water-fall ; for with modern methods 
it pays to crush rock with even a few dollars a ton 
value in it, and the Americans of to-day mine much 
that the Spaniards with their crude methods cast 
aside or did not attempt to work. At a mine in the 
vicinity the ancient, stone mansion serving as resi- 
dence of the superintendent was torn down and sent 



116 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

through the stamping-mill, and a new one of less 
valuable rock erected. We descended 1600 feet into 
the mine of La Luz down a perfectly round, stone- 
lined shaft in a small iron bucket held by a one-inch 
wire cable and entirely in charge of peons — who 
fortunately either had nothing against us or did not 
dare to vent it. 



CHAPTER IV 

BOUND ABOUT IAKE CHAPALA 

WITH the coming of November I left Guana- 
juato behind. The branch line down to 
Silao was soon among broad plains of corn, with- 
out rocks even along the flat, ragged, country roads, 
bringing to mind that it was long since I had walked 
on level and unobstructed ground. The crowding 
of the second-class car forced me to share a 
bench with a chorus girl of the company that had 
been castilianizing venerable Broadway favorites in 
Guanajuato's chief theater. She was about forty, 
looked it with compound interest, was graced with 
the form of a Panteon mummy, and a face — but 
some things are too horrible even to be mentioned in 
print. Most of the way she wept copiously, appar- 
ently at some secret a pocket mirror insisted on re- 
peating to her as often as she drew it out, and re- 
gained her spirits only momentarily during the 
smoking of each of several cigarettes. Finally she 
took to saying her beads in a sepulchral, moaning 
voice, her eyes closed, and wagging her head from 
side to side in the rhythm of her professional calling, 

117 



118 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

until we pulled into the one-story, adobe, checker- 
board town. All the troupe except the two " stars " 
rode second-class, dressed much like peons, and car- 
ried their possessions in misshapen bundles under 
their arms. If the one performance I had seen was 
typical, this was far better treatment than they de- 
served. 

The express from El Paso and the North set me 
down in the early night at Irapuato, out of the dark- 
ness of which bobbed up a dozen old women, men, 
and boys with wailing cries of " Fresas ! " For this 
is the town of perennial strawberries. The basket 
of that fruit heaped high and fully a foot in diameter 
which sat before me next morning as we rambled 
away westward toward Guadalajara cost cuatro 
reales — a quarter, and if the berries grew symmet- 
rically smaller toward the bottom, an all-day ap- 
petite by no means brought to light the tiniest. 
The way lay across a level land bathed in sunshine, 
of extreme fertility, and watered by harnessed 
streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the 
day one had a sense of the richness of nature, not the 
prodigality of the tropics to make man indolent, but 
just sufficient to give full reward for reasonable ex- 
ertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were burn- 
ished here and there with little shallow lakes of the 
rainy season, and musical with wild birds of many 
species. Primitive well-sweeps punctuated the land- 
scape, and now and then the church towers of 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 119 

some adobe village peered through the mesquite trees. 
In the afternoon grazing grew more frequent and 
herds of cattle and flocks of goats populated all the 
scene. Within the car and without, the hats of the 
peons, with all their sameness, were never exactly 
alike. Each bore some individuality, be it in shape, 
shade, material, or manner of wearing, as distinct 
as among the fair sex in other lands ; and that with- 
out resorting to decorating them with flowers, vege- 
tables, Or dead birds. Some wore around them rib- 
bons with huge letters proposing, " Viva " this 

or that latest aspirant to the favor of the primitive- 
minded " pela'o," but these were always arranged 
in a manner to add to rather than detract from 
the artistic ensemble. Many a young woman of 
the same class was quite attractive in appearance, 
though thick bulky noses robbed all of the right to be 
called beautiful. They did not lose their charms, 
such as they were, prematurely, as do so many races 
of the South, and the simplicity of dress and hair 
arrangement added much to the pleasing general 
effect. 

As night descended we began to pant upward 
through low hills, wooded, but free from the rocks 
and boulders of a mining region, and in the first 
darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of 
Mexico. It is a place that adorns the earth. 
Jalisco State, of which this is the capital, has been 
called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is in- 



120 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

deed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her 
spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much 
more tempered with a constant fear of betraying 
their crudeness and in consequence much weighed 
down by " propriety." But its bright, central plaza 
has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays 
amid the orange trees heavy with ripening fruit, the 
more haughty of the population promenade the in- 
ner square, outside which stroll the peons and " lower 
classes " ; though only custom seems responsible for 
the division. One misses in Mexico the genuine de- 
mocracy of Spain. The idea of a conquered race still 
holds, and whoever has a strain of white in his veins 
— or even in the hue of his collar — considers it 
fitting to treat the Indian mass with a cold, indiffer- 
ent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the 
unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than 
within. One was reminded of Mark Twain's sug- 
gestion that complexions of some color wear best in 
tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the 
rebozo were vastly superior to those who stepped 
from their carriages at about the beginning of the 
third number and took to parading, the two sexes in 
pairs marching in opposite directions at a snail's 
pace. The " women of the people " had more sense 
of the fitness of things than to ape the wealthy in 
dress, like the corresponding class in our own land, 
and their simplicity of attire stood out in attractive 




Lake Chapala from the estate of Jtibero Castellanos 




The head farmer of the estate under an aged fig-tree 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 123 

contrast to the pasty features and unexercised 
figures in " Parisian " garb of the inner circle. 

Guadalajara has the requisites of a real city. 
Its streets are well paved with macadam, and it even 
possesses garbage wagons. Indeed, in some respects 
it has carried" progress " too far, as in the case of 
the winking electric sign of Broadway proportions 
advertising a camiseria — a local " shirtery," before 
which fascinated peons from the distant villages 
stand gazing as at one of the seven wonders of the 
universe. Beggars are few and there is none of the 
oppressive poverty, of other Mexican cities. This, 
it is agreed, is due not merely to the extreme fertility 
of Jalisco, but to the kindness of nature in refusing 
to produce the maguey in the vicinity, so that drunk- 
enness is at its lowest Mexican ebb and the sour 
stink of pulque shops nowhere assails the nostrils. 
For this curse of the peon will not endure long trans- 
portation. An abundance of cheap labor makes 
possible many little conveniences unknown in more 
industrial lands, and the city has a peaceful, sooth- 
ing air and temperature, due perhaps to its ideal alti- 
tude of six thousand feet, that makes life drift along 
like a pleasant dream. 

But its nights are hideous. The Mexican seems 
to relish constant uproar, and if Guadalajara is 
ever to be the open-air health resort for frayed 
nerves and weakened lungs it aspires to, there must 



124 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

come a diligent suppression of unnecessary noises. 
As the evening gathering evaporates, leaving the 
plaza sprinkled with a few dreamy mortals and scat- 
tered policemen eating the lunch their wives bring 
and share with them, pandemonium seems to be re- 
leased from its confinement. First these same pre- 
servers of law and order take to blowing their hair- 
raising whistles at least every ten minutes from one 
to another back and forth through every street, as 
if mutually to keep up their courage. Scores of the 
gilded youth on the way home from " playing the 
bear" before their favorite rejas join together in 
bands to howl their glee at the kindness of life into 
the small hours, the entire stock of street-cars seems 
to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion 
with orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and 
long before dawn even the few who have succeeded 
in falling into a doze are snatched awake by an atro- 
cious din of church-bells sufficient in number to sup- 
ply heaven, nirvana, the realm of houris, and the 
Irish section of purgatory, with enough left over to 
furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of 
the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn 
every living dog and fighting-cock, of which each 
inhabitant appears to possess at least a score, joins 
the forty-thousand vendors of forty thousand differ- 
ent species of uselessness howling in at least as many 
different voices and tones, each a bit louder than 
all the others, until even an unoccupied wanderer 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 125 

concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too 
short existence. 

I brought up a day of random wandering in 
state's prison. The Penitenciaria of Guadalajara 
is a huge, wheel-shaped building in the most modern 
style of that class of architecture. The bullet- 
headed youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion 
of a long-undusted carpet, leaning on his musket at 
the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I stepped 
forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find 
that most of the public had preceded me, including 
some hundred fruit, tortilla, cigarette, and candy 
vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I ap- 
proached another stern boy armed like a first-class 
cruiser in war time and he motioned upward with 
his gun barrel. The dwelling of the comandante 
faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His 
son, aged five, met me with the information : 

" Papa 'sta dormido." 

But he was misinformed, for when his mother in- 
troduced me into the parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, 
was already rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and 
preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. 
When my impressiveness had penetrated his re- 
awakening intellect, he prepared me a document 
which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the 
statement that the prison and all it contained was 
mine for the asking. 

A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three 



126 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

immense iron doors through anterooms in charge 
of trusties, in prison garb of the material of blue 
overalls and caps shaped like a low fez. Inside, a 
" preso de confianza " serving as turnkey led the way 
along a great stone corridor to a little central patio 
with flowers and a central fountain babbling mer- 
rily. From this radiated fifteen other long-vaulted 
passages, seeming each fully a half mile in length; 
for with Latin love of the theatrical the farther ends 
had been painted to resemble an endless array of 
cells, even the numbers being continued above the 
false doors to minute infinity. Besides these imag- 
inary ones there were some forty real places of con- 
finement on each side of each coridor, three-cornered, 
stone rooms with a comfortable cot and noticeable 
cleanliness. The hundred or more convicts, wander- 
ing about or sitting in the sun of the patio, were 
only locked in them by night. Whenever we entered 
a corridor or a room, two strokes were sounded on 
a bell and all arose and stood at attention until we 
had passed. Yet the discipline was not oppressive, 
petty matters being disregarded. The corridor of 
those condemned to be shot was closed with an iron- 
barred gate, but the inmates obeyed with alacrity 
when my guide ordered them to step forth to be pho- 
tographed. 

One of the passageways led to the talleres or 
workshops, also long and vaulted and well-lighted by 
windows high up in the curve of the arched roof. 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA 127 

These showed the stone walls to be at least four 
feet thick, yet the floor was of earth. On it along 
the walls sat men weaving straw ribbons to be sewn 
into hats on the American sewing-machines beyond. 
In side rooms were blacksmith, carpenter, and tin- 
smith shops in which all work was done by hand, 
the absence of machinery suggesting to the trusty in 
charge that Mexico is " muy pobre " as compared 
with other lands. Convicts were obliged to work 
seven hours a day. Scattered through the building 
were several small patios with patches of sun, in 
which many prisoners were engaged in making in- 
genious little knickknacks which they were permitted 
to sell for their own benefit. The speciality of one 
old fellow under life sentence was a coin purse with 
the slightly incongruous device, " Viva la Inde- 
pendencia ! " 

There was a complete absence of vicious faces, at 
least faces more so than those of the great mass of 
peons outside. I recalled the assertions of cyn- 
ical American residents that all Mexicans are crim- 
inals and that those in jail were only the ones who 
have had the misfortune to get caught. Certainly 
there was nothing in their outward appearance to 
distinguish the inmates from any gathering of the 
same class beyond prison walls. Off one corridor 
opened the bath patio, large, and gay with sunshine 
and flowers, with a large swimming pool and several 
smaller baths. The prisoners are required to bathe 



128 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

at least every Sunday. Within the penitentiary was 
a garden of several acres, on the walls above which 
guards patroled with loaded muskets and in which 
prisoners raised every species of fruit and vegetable 
known in the region. The institution indeed was 
fully self-supporting. The kitchen was lined with 
huge vats into which bushels of beans, corn, and the 
like were shoveled, and like the prison tailor, shoe, 
and barber shops, was kept in excellent order. Sev- 
eral short-time prisoners, among them many boys, 
volunteered to stand in appropriate attitudes before 
the heavy wall at the end of a three-cornered court 
where condemned men are shot at three paces in the 
dawn of many an early summer day. In one cor- 
ridor the prison band, entirely made up of prisoners, 
was practising, and when I had been seated in state 
on a wooden bench they struck up several American 
favorites, ending with our national hymn, all played 
with the musical skill common to the Mexican Indian, 
even among those unable to read a note. On the 
whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as fitted 
such an institution, except the women's ward, into 
which a vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at 
sight of the comandante's order. A silent, nonde- 
script woman of forty took me in charge with all too 
evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on 
which opened the rooms of female inmates, while 
the fifty or more of them left off their cooking and 
washing for the male prisoners and stood at dis- 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA 129 

gruntled attention in sullen silence. Their quarters 
were noticeably dirtier than those of the men. My 
guide took leave of me at the first of the three iron 
doors, having still to postpone his exit a year or 
more, and these again, fortunately, swung on their 
hinges as if by magic to let pass only one of the thou- 
sand of us within. 

On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out 
to the " Niagara of Mexico " were three resident 
Germans who strove to be " simpatico " to the na- 
tives by a clumsy species of " horse play." Their 
asininity is worth mention only because among those 
laughing at their antics was a peon who had been 
gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet 
who sat on the back platform without even a rag 
around the wound, though with a rope tourniquet 
above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with 
him and half way out stopped at a stone hut to ar- 
rest the perpetrator of the deed and bring him along, 
wrapped in the customary red sarape and indiffer- 
ence. 

The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleas- 
ing but not extraordinary, and swinging on my ruck- 
sack I struck off afoot. The lightly rolling land was 
very fertile, with much corn, great droves of cattle, 
and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross 
between late spring and early fall. From El 
Castillo the path lay along the shimmering railroad, 
on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station. 



130 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of 
their hats gave the distance to Chapala as fifteen 
miles, and advised me to hire a horse or take passage 
in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red 
in color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, 
was drawn by four teams of mules in tandem, and be- 
fore revolution spread over the land was customarily 
packed to the roof and high above it with excursion- 
ists to Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now 
it dashed back and forth almost empty. 

I preferred my own legs. A soft road led be- 
tween orange-groves — at the station were offered 
for sale seedless oranges compared to which those of 
California are pigmies — to the drowsing town of 
Atequisa. Through one of its crumbling stone gates 
the way spread at large over its sandy, sun-bathed 
plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, 
rising leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer 
of sixty, homeward bound to his village of Santa 
Cruz on a loose-eared ass, fell in with me. He lacked 
entirely that incommunicative manner and half-re- 
sentful air I had so often encountered in the Mexi- 
can, and his country dialect whiled away the time as 
we followed the un fenced " road " around and slowly 
upward into hills less rugged than those about 
Guanajuato and thinly covered with coarse grass 
and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had 
worked here as mozo for " gringoes," my compatriots. 
They had offered him a whole peso a day if he would 




mm 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA 133 

not get married. But " he and she both wanted," 
so " que quiera uste' " ? They had started farming 
on a little piece of rocky ridge. He would point it 
out to me when we came nearer. By and by he had 
bought another piece of land for fifty pesos and then 
poco a poco for forty pesos some more. Then for 
twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a 
cow, and the vaca before long gave them a fine calf 
and twelve cuartittos of milk a day. So that he was 
able to buy another heifer and then an ox and finally 
another ox and — 

Whack! It took many a thump and prod and 
" Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o ! " to make the pretty little mouse- 
colored donkey he was riding keep up with me — and 
what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos ! 
Si, senor, ni mas ni menos. A bargain, eh? And 
for the other one at home, which is larger, only 
twenty-two pesos, and for the one they stole from 
him, fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once they 
stole all three of the burritos and he ran half way to 
Colima and had them arrested and got the animalitos 
back. So that now he had two oxen — pray God 
they were still safe — and two burros and three 
pieces of land and a good wife — only yesterday she 
fell down and broke her arm and he had had to cut 
sticks to tie it up and she would have to work with- 
out using it for a long time — 

Whack ! " Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro ! " and once he 
owned it he never could get himself to sell an ani- 



134 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

malito. They were sometimes useful to plow and 
plant anyway, and this life of sembrar and cosechar 
was just the one for him. The cities, bah ! — though 
he had been twice to Guadalajara and only too glad 
to get away again — and was n't I tired enough to 
try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth 
as sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I 
got tired I could come and spend the night in his 
casita, a very poor little house, to be sure, which he 
had built himself long ago, soon after they were mar- 
ried, but there I would be in my own house, and his 
wife — or perhaps now he himself — would ordenar 
"la vaca and there would be fresh milk and — 

So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and 
there the road passed through an open gate as into 
a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences 
to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or 
estate. From the highest point there was a pretty 
retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the 
broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and 
ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering 
in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, 
rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cul- 
tivation also, one vast field of ripening Indian corn 
surely four miles long and half as wide stretching 
like a sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the 
leaf and branch shacks of its guardians. Maize, too, 
covered all the slope down to the mountain-girdled 
lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 135 

out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the 
church of Chapala stood out against the dimming 
lake and the blue-gray range beyond. 

Two leagues off it the peasant pointed out the 
ridge that hid his casita and his animalitos and his 
good wife — with her broken arm now — and regret- 
ting that I would not accept his poor hospitality, 
for I must be tired, he rode away down a little bar- 
ranca walled by tall bushes with brilliant masses of 
purple, red, and pink flowers and so on up to the 
little patch of corn which — yes, surely, I could see 
a corner of it from here, and from it, if only I would 
come, I should see the broad blue view of Chapala 
lake, and — My road descended and went down 
into the night, plentifully scattered with loose stones. 
Before it had grown really dark I found myself cast- 
ing a shadow ahead, and turned to find an enormous 
red moon gazing dreamily at me from the summit of 
the road behind. Then came the suburbs and enor- 
mous ox-carts loaded with everything, and donkeys 
without number passing silent-footed in the sand, and 
peons, lacking entirely the half-insolence and pulque- 
sodden faces of Guanajuato region, greeted me un- 
failingly with " Adios " or " Buenas noches." 

But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay 
high in the " Hotel Victor " — the larger ones being 
closed since anarchy had confined the wealthy to their 
cities — for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries 
old served by waiters in evening dress and trained- 



136 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

monkey manners. The free and easy old casa de 
asistencia of Guadalajara was far more to my liking. 
But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks 
for a moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering 
some secret to its sandy beaches in the silence of the 
silver-flooded night. 

It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only 
to Titicaca among the lofty sheets of water of the 
Western world. More than five thousand feet above 
the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. 
Waves were dashing high at the foot of the town 
in the morning. Its fishermen are ever fearful of 
its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every 
trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired 
village church up toward which the lake was surging 
this morning as if in anger that this place of refuge 
should be granted its legitimate victims. 

Its rage made the journey by water I had planned 
to Ribera Castellanos inadvisable, even had an owner 
of one of the little open boats of the fishermen been 
willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and 
by blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road 
of yesterday. The orange vendors of Atequisa 
gathered around me at the station, marveling at the 
strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench 
with a dignified old Mexican of the country regions, 
who at length lost his reserve sufficiently to tell me 
of the " muy amigo gringo " whose picture he still 
had on the wall of his house since the day twenty- 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA 137 

seven years ago when my compatriot had stopped 
with him on a tour of his native State, carrying a 
small pack of merchandise which gave him the en- 
tree into all houses, but which he purposely held at 
so high a price that none would buy. 

From Ocotlan station a broad level highway, from 
which a glimpse is had of the sharp, double peak of 
Colima volcano, runs out to Ribera Castellanos. 
Sam Rogers was building a tourist hotel there. Its 
broad lawn sloped down to the edge of Lake Chapala, 
lapping at the shores like some smaller ocean; from 
its verandas spread a view of sixty miles across the 
Mexican Titicaca, with all vacation sports, a per- 
ennial summer without undue heat, and such sunsets 
as none can describe. The hacienda San Andres, 
also American owned, embraced thousands of acres 
of rich bottom land on which already many varieties 
of fruit were producing marvelously, as well as sev- 
eral mountain peaks and a long stretch of lake front. 
The estate headquarters was like some modern rail- 
way office, with its staff of employees. In the near- 
by stables horses were saddled for us and we set off 
for a day's trip all within the confines of the farm, 
under guidance of the bulky Mexican head overseer 
in all his wealth of national garb and armament. 

For miles away in several directions immense fields 
were being plowed by dozens of ox-teams, the white 
garments of the drivers standing out sharply against 
the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around 



138 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

the lagoon furnishing water for irrigation brought 
us to a village of some size, belonging to the estate. 
The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged from her 
hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and 
the manner of a serf of medieval times before her 
feudal lord. The bees lived in hollow logs with little 
thatched roofs. For several miles more the rich bot- 
tom lands continued. Then we began to ascend 
through bushy foothills, and cultivation dropped be- 
hind us, as did the massive head overseer, whose 
weight threatened to break his horse's back. Well 
up we came upon the " chaparral," the hacienda 
herdsman, T +awny with sunburn even to his leather 
garments. He knew by name every animal under his 
charge, though the owners did not even know the 
number they possessed. A still steeper climb, dur- 
ing the last of which even the horses had to be aban- 
doned, brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire 
lake, with the villages on its edge, and range after 
range of the mountains of Jalisco and Michoacan. 
Our animals were more than an hour picking their 
way down the stony trails between all but perpendic- 
ular cornfields, the leaves of which had been stripped 
off to permit the huge ear at the top the more fully 
to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a 
field would have been sure death to the man or horse 
it struck at the bottom. 

The hotel launch set me across the lake next morn- 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 159 

ing. From the rock-tumbled fisher-town of La 
Palma an arriero pointed out to me far away across 
the plains of Michoacan a mountain of striking re- 
semblance to Mt. Tabor in Palestine, as the land- 
mark on the slopes of which to seek that night's 
lodging. The treeless land of rich black loam was 
flat as a table, yet the trail took many a turn, now to 
avoid the dyke of a former governor and Porfirio 
Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of the lake, 
now for some reason only those with Mexican blood 
in their veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in 
the irrigating ditches with machetes, laying their 
huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on the grass 
behind them. 

Noon brought Sahuayo, a large village in an 
agricultural district, in one of the huts of which ten 
cents produced soup, pork, frijoles, tortillas, and 
coffee, to say nothing of the tablecloth in honor of so 
unexpected a guest and a dozen oranges for the 
thirst beyond. The new trail struck off across the 
fields almost at right angles to the one that had 
brought me. I was already on the hacienda Guara- 
cha, largest of the State of Michoacan, including 
within its holdings a dozen such villages as this, but 
the owner to whom I bore a letter lived still leagues 
distant. Dwellers on the estate must labor on it 
when required or seek residence elsewhere, which 
means far distant. All with whom I spoke on the 



140 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

subject, native or foreigners, seemed agreed that the 
peon prefers this plan to being thrown on his own 
responsibility. 

The traveler could easily fancy himself in danger 
in this vast fenceless and defenseless space. Enor- 
mous herds were visible for miles in every direction, 
bulls roamed here and there, bellowing moodily, cat- 
tle and horses by hundreds waded and grazed in the 
shallow swamps across which the dyked path led. 
All the brilliant day " Mt. Tabor " stood forth in all 
its beauty across the plain in this clear air, and the 
sun brought sweat even at more than a mile above 
the sea. 

I was in the very heart of Birdland. These, broad, 
table-flat stretches of rich plateau, now half inun- 
dated, seemed some enormous outdoor aviary. 
Every species of winged creature one had hoped ever 
to see even in Zoo cages or the cases of museums 
seemed here to live and fly and have its songful being. 
Great sluggish sopilotes of the horrid vulture family 
strolled or circled lazily about, seeking the scent of 
carrion. Long-legged, snow-white herons stood in 
the marshes. Great flocks of small black birds that 
could not possibly have numbered less than a hundred 
thousand each rose and fell and undulated in waves 
and curtains against the background of mountains 
beyond, screening it as by some great black veil. 
There were blood-red birds, birds blue as turquoise, 
some of almost lilac hue, every grassy pond was over- 




Making glazed floor tiles on a Mexican estate 




Vast seas of Indian corn stretch to pine-clad hills, while around 
them are guard-shacks at frequent intervals 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 143 

spread with wild ducks so tame they seemed waiting 
to be picked up and caressed, eagles showed off their 
spiral curves in the sky above like daring aviators 
over some admiring field of spectators ; everywhere 
the stilly hum of semi-tropical life was broken only 
by the countless and inimitable bird calls. 

As my shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path 
struck across a long wet field against the black soil 
of which the dozens of white-clad peons with their 
mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony sur- 
face. Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, 
and joined a wide road leading directly to an im- 
mense cluster of buildings among trees. The sun 
was firing the western horizon. From every direc- 
tion groups of white-garbed peons were drawing like 
homing pigeons toward this center of the visible 
landscape. I reached it with them and, passing 
through several massive gates, mounted through a 
corral or cobbled stable yard with many bulky, two- 
wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up 
an inclined, cobbled way through a garden of flowers 
to the immense pillared veranda with cement floor of 
the owner's hacienda residence. 

The building was in the form of a hollow square, 
enclosing a flowery patio as large as many a town 
plaza. Don Diego was not at home, nor indeed were 
any of his immediate family, who preferred the ur- 
ban pleasures of Guadalajara. The Indian door- 
tender brought me to " Don Carlos," a fat, cheerful 



144 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

man of forty in a white jacket, close-fitting trousers, 
and an immense revolver attached to the left side of 
his broad and heavily weighted cartridge-belt. I 
presented my letter of introduction from an Ameri- 
can friend of the owner and was soon entangled in the 
coils of Mexican pseudo-politeness. Don Carlos tore 
himself away from his priceless labors as manager of 
the hacienda and took me up on the flat roof of the 
two-story house, from which a fine view was had for 
miles in all directions ; indeed, nearly a half of the 
estate could be seen, with its peon villages, its broad 
stretches of new-plowed fields, and the now smoke- 
less chimney of the sugar mill among the trees. 

The interest of the manager did not extend beyond 
the cut-and-dried formalities common to all Mexi- 
cans. In spite of his honeyed words, it was evident 
he looked upon me as a necessary evil, purposely 
come to the hacienda to seek food and lodging, and 
to be gotten rid of as soon as possible, compatible 
with the sacred Arabian rules of hospitality. I had 
not yet learned that a letter of introduction in Latin 
America, given on the slightest provocation, is of 
just the grade of importance such custom would 
warrant. Not that Don Carlos was rude. Indeed, 
he strove outwardly to be highly simpdtico. But 
one read the insincerity underneath by a kind of in- 
tuition, and longed for the abrupt but honestly 
frank Texan. 

The two front corners of the estate residence were 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 145 

taken up by the hacienda store and church respect- 
ively — a handy arrangement by virtue of which 
whatever went out the pay window to the peons (and 
it was not much) came in again at one or the other 
of the corner doors. Adjoining the building and 
half surrounding it was an entire village, with a flow- 
ery plaza and promenades for its inhabitants. The 
owners of the estate were less churlishly selfish than 
their prototypes in our own country, in that they 
permitted the public, which is to say their own work- 
men and families, to go freely anywhere in the family 
residence and its patio, except into the dwelling- 
rooms proper. 

When darkness came on we sat in the piazza gar- 
den overlooking the mule-yard. The evening church 
service over, the estate priest came to join us, put- 
ting on his huge black " Texas " hat and lighting a 
cigarette on the chapel threshold. He wore an in- 
numerable series of long black robes, which still did 
not conceal the fact that the curve from chest to 
waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured 
figures, and his hand-shake was particularly soft and 
snaky. He quickly took charge of the conversation 
and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be 
set down by the writers of modern days, denied the 
catholic privileges of old Boccaccio and Rabelais. 

Toward eight supper was announced. But in- 
stead of the conversational feast amid a company of 
educated Mexican men and women I had pictured to 



146 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

myself during the day's tramp, I was led into a bare 
stone room with a long, white-clothed table, on a 
corner of which sat in solitary state two plates and 
a salt cellar. A peon waiter brought an ample, 
though by no means epicurean, supper, through all 
which Don Carlos sat smoking over his empty plate 
opposite me, alleging that he never ate after noon- 
day for dread of taking on still greater weight, and 
striving to keep a well-bred false politeness in the 
voice in which he answered my few questions. He 
had spent a year in a college of New Jersey, but had 
not even learned to pronounce the name of that State. 
Having pointed out to me the room I was to occupy, 
he excused himself for a " momentito," and I have 
never seen him since. 

Evidently horrified at the sight of a white man, 
even if only a " gringo," traveling on foot, the man- 
ager had insisted on lending me a horse and mozo to 
the railroad station of Moreno, fifteen miles distant, 
but still within the confines of the hacienda. It may 
be also that he gave orders to have me out of his 
sight before he rose. At any rate it was barely three 
when a knock at the door aroused me and by four I 
stumbled out into the black starlit night to find sad- 
dled for me in the mule-corral what might by a con- 
siderable stretch of the word be called a horse. The 
mozo was well mounted, however, and the family 
chauffeur, carrying in one hand a basket of eggs he 
had been sent to fetch the estate owner in Guadala- 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 147 

jara, rode a magnificent white animal. Without 
even the formal leave-taking cup of coffee, we set off 
on the road to the eastward. For road in Mexico 
always read — at best a winding stretch of dried 
mud with narrow paths meandering though the 
smoother parts of it, the whole tumbled everywhere 
with stones and rocks and broken by frequent unex- 
pected deep cracks and stony gorges. My " horse " 
was as striking a caricature of that species of quad- 
ruped as could have been found in an all-night search 
in the region, which indeed there was reason to be- 
lieve had been produced in just that manner. But 
at least it had the advantage of being unable to keep 
up with my companions, leaving me alone behind in 
far more pleasant company. 

We wound through several long peon villages, mere 
grass huts on the bare earth floors of which the in- 
habitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I had not 
been supplied with spurs, essential to all horseman- 
ship in Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second 
intervals to prick up the jade between my legs with 
the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at hand, 
or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and 
the horizon ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons 
wrapped in their sarapes passed now and then noise- 
lessly in their soft leather huaraches close beside me. 
In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women 
might be heard already crushing in their stone mor- 
tars, under stone rolling-pins, maize for the morning 



148 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wan- 
der lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it 
grew lighter until suddenly an immense red sun 
leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead, 
just as we sighted an isolated station building in the 
wilderness that now surrounded us on all sides. 

A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, 
half-mountainous country, stopping at every collec- 
tion of huts to pick up or set down a peon or two, 
and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a popu- 
lous, flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city 
of checkerboard pattern, on the plaza of which faced 
the " Hotel Morelos," formerly the " Porfirio Diaz," 
but with that seditious name now carefully painted 
over. Being barely a mile above sea-level, the town 
has a suggestion of the tropics and the temperature 
of midday is distinctly noticeable. 

Zamora ranks as the most fanatical spot in 
Michoacan, which is itself so throttled by the church 
that it is known as the " estado torpe," the torpid 
State. Its bishop is rated second in all Mexico only 
to that of the sacred city of Guadalupe. Here are 
monasteries, and monks, and nuns in seclusion, priests 
roam the streets in robes and vestments, form pro- 
cessions, and display publicly the " host " and other 
paraphernalia of their faith; all of which is forbid- 
den by the laws of Mexico. When I emerged from 
the hotel, every person in sight, from newsboys to 
lawyers in frock coats, was kneeling wherever he hap- 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 149 

pened to be, on his veranda, on the sidewalk, or in 
the middle of the street, his hat laid on the ground 
before him, facing a high churchman in flowing robes 
and a " stove-pipe " hat strutting across the plaza 
toward the cathedral. Traveling priests wear their 
regalia of office as far as Yurecuaro on the main line, 
changing there to civilian garb. 

Nor is the power of the church here confined to 
things spiritual. Vast portions of the richest sec- 
tions of the State are church owned, though osten- 
sibly property of the lawyers that control them. 
Holding the reins, the ecclesiastics make it impossible 
for companies to open up enterprises except under 
their tutelage. The population of the State is some 
eighty per cent, illiterate, yet even foreigners find 
it impossible to set up schools for their own em- 
ployees. The women of all classes are almost with- 
out exception illiterate. The church refuses to edu- 
cate them, and sternly forbids any one else to do so. 
An American Catholic long resident reported even 
the priests ignorant beyond belief, and asserted that 
usury and immorality was almost universal among 
the churchmen of all grades. The peasants are 
forced to give a tenth of all they produce, be it only 
a patch of corn, to the church, which holds its stores 
until prices are high, while the poverty-stricken peon 
must sell for what he can get. Those married by the 
church are forbidden to contract the civil ceremony, 
though the former is unlawful and lack of the latter 



150 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

makes their children legally illegitimate. The local 
form of worship includes many of the barbaric super- 
stitions of the Indians grafted on the stems of Ca- 
tholicism, and weird pagan dances before the altar 
are a part of many a fiesta. The town has already 
churches sufficient to house easily all the population, 
yet an immense new cathedral is building. The pur- 
pose of its erection, according to the bishop, is " for 
the greater glorification of God." 

I spent two days with the American superintendent 
of " Platanal," the electric plant run by water power 
a few miles out of town through fields of head-high 
maize. The night before my arrival bandits had 
raided the establishment and one of them had been 
killed. The president of Zamora had profusely 
thanked the " gringo " in charge when he presented 
himself in town with the body. On pay-day the 
manager went and came from the bank with two im- 
mense revolvers and a loaded rifle. 

The current supplied by the rapids of " Platanal " 
is carried on high-tension wires to several cities far 
distant, including Guanajuato, a hundred miles away. 
Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of 
" Pingiiico " mine hangs suspended in its shaft and 
Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In 
the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and 
immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, ac- 
cording to the period of year, keep the repair gangs 
busy by flying against the wires and causing short 



ROUND ABOUT LAKE CHAP ALA 153 

circuits through their dead bodies. Woodpeckers 
eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers 
with disheartening rapidity. The company is phil- 
anthropically inclined toward its employees. Even 
the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay, 
during which many rent a patch of land on the moun- 
tainside to plant with corn. A savings bank system 
is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted upon in 
the houses furnished by the company, and the 
methods of the haciendas of the region, of paying the 
peon the lowest possible wages for his labor and 
produce and selling to him at the highest possible 
prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in 
constant debt and a species of slavery, are avoided. 
The result is a permanent force of high Mexican 
grade. All attempts of the company to introduce 
schools, however, even on its own property, have been 
frustrated by the powerful churchmen. A bright 
young native in the plant was an expert at figures, 
which he had been surreptitiously taught by his 
" gringo " superior, but he could not sign his name. 



CHAPTER (V: 

ON THE TEAIL IN MICHOACAN 

MY compatriot strongly opposed my plan of 
walking to Uruapan — at least without an 
armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, 
the Tarascan Indians, living much as they did at the 
time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, 
they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dan- 
gerously superstitious on the subject of photog- 
raphy. There are persons who would consider it 
perilous to walk the length of Broadway, and lose 
sight even of the added attraction of that reputed 
drawback. 

I was off at dawn. Hundreds of Indians from the 
interior had slept in scattered groups all along the 
road to town, beside the produce they had come to 
sell on market day. For it is against the law to be 
found out of doors in Zamora after ten! My com- 
patriot had twice fallen foul of the vigilant police 
there and been roundly mulcted — once the bolt of 
the hired carriage in which he was riding broke, the 
conveyance turned turtle, mashed his foot, and cov- 
ered his face with blood, and he was imprisoned and 

154 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 155 

fined for " escandalo." On another occasion he 
spent some time in jail because his mozo behind him 
accidentally knocked over the lantern of a policeman 
set in the middle of the street. 

But let us leave so straight-laced a spot behind. 
The rocky " road " could not hold to the same opin- 
ion for a hundred consecutive yards, but kept chang- 
ing its mind as often as it caught sight of some 
new corner of the landscape. The Indians, who 
crowded the way during the first hour, were not 
friendly, but neither did they show any dangerous 
propensities, and never failed in greeting if spoken 
to first. There were many of them of pure aborig- 
inal blood. The stony road climbed somewhat to 
gain Tangantzicuaro, then stumbled across a flatter 
country growing more wooded to Chilota, a large 
town with a tiny plaza and curious, overhanging 
eaves, reminiscent of Japan, stretching down its 
checker-board streets in all directions. 

The trail, which had gone a mile or more out of 
its way to visit the place, no sooner left it than it 
fell abruptly into the bed of what in other weather 
would have been a rocky mountain torrent, and set 
off with it in a totally new direction, as if, having 
fallen in with congenial company, it had entirely for- 
gotten the errand on which it had first set forth. 
The land was fertile, with much corn. In time road 
and river bed parted company, though only after 
several attempts, like old gossips, and the former 



156 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

took to climbing upward through thin forests of pine 
in which the wind whispered an imitation of some dis- 
tant, small waterfall. For some miles there were no 
houses. Up and down and in and out of valleys thin 
with pine we wandered, with now and then a rough 
shelter of rubbish and thatch, halting places of 
traveling Indians or the guard-houses of their fields, 
while the sky ahead was always filled half-way up by 
peaks of many shapes wooded in every inch with 
brightest evergreens. Michoacan is celebrated for 
its forests. 

The population showed no great difference from 
the peasants elsewhere. I ran early into their super- 
stitions against photography, however, their belief, 
common to many uncivilized races, being that once 
their image is reproduced any fate that befalls it 
must occur to them in person. When I stepped into 
a field toward a man behind his wooden plow, he said 
in a very decided tone of voice, " No, senor, no 
quiero I " 

"Why not?" I asked. 

" Porque no quiero, seilor," and he swung the sort 
of small adze he carried to break up the clods of the 
field rather loosely and with a determined gleam in 
his eye. I did not want the picture so badly as all 
that. 

There was no such objection in the straggling 
town made of thatch and rubbish I found along the 
way early in the afternoon. The hut I entered for 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 157 

food had an unleveled earth floor, many wide cracks 
in the roof, and every inch within was black with soot 
of the cooking-stove — three large stones with a 
steaming earthen pot on them. There was carne de 
carnero, tortillas and water, all for five cents. The 
weak-kneed table was spread with a white cloth, there 
were several awkward, shallow, home-made chairs, 
and against the wall a large primitive sideboard 
with glistening brown earthen pots and carefully 
polished plates and bowls. When I had photo- 
graphed the interior, la senora asked if I would take 
a second picture, and raced away to another hut. 
She soon returned with a very small and poor ama- 
teur print of two peons in Sunday dress. One of 
them was her son, who had been killed by a falling 
pine, and the simple creature fancied the magic con- 
trivance I carried could turn this tiny likeness into 
a life-size portrait. 

Beyond, were more rocks and wooded mountains, 
with vast seas of Indian corn stretching to pine-clad 
cliffs, around the " shores " of which were dozens of 
make-shift shacks for the guardians against theft 
of the grain. Later I passed an enormous field of 
maize, which more than a hundred Indians of both 
sexes and every age that could stand on its own legs 
were harvesting. It was a communal corn-field, of 
which there are many in this region. They picked 
the ears from the dry stalks still standing and, toss- 
ing them into baskets, heaped them up in various 



158 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

parts of the field and at little temporary shanties 
a bit above the general level on the surrounding 
" coast." As I passed, the gang broke up and peons 
in all colors, male, female, and in embryo, went away 
in all directions like a scattering flock of birds. 

Thus far there had been no suggestion of the 
reputed dangers of the road. But trouble is never 
far off in Mexico, since the failure of its rapidly 
changing governments to put down bands of ma- 
rauders has given every rascal in the country the no- 
tion of being his own master. The sun was just set- 
ting when, among several groups coming and going, 
I heard ahead five peons, maudlin with mescal, sing- 
ing and howling at the top of their voices. As they 
drew near, one of them said something to his compan- 
ions about " armas." I fancied he was expressing 
some idle drunken wonder as to whether I was armed 
or not, and as he held a hand behind him as if it 
might grasp a rock, I kept a weather eye on him as we 
approached. Had the weapon I carried in sight been 
a huge six-shooter, even without cartridges, it would 
probably have been more effective than the toy au- 
tomatic well loaded. As the group passed, howling 
drunkenly, a veritable giant of a fellow suddenly 
jumped toward me with an oath. I drew my puta- 
tive weapon, and at the same moment the hand I had 
guessed to be full of rock appeared with an enormous 
revolver, shining new. With drunken flourishes the 
peon invited me to a duel. I kept him unostenta- 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 159 

tiously covered but continued serenely on my way. 
To have shown fear would have been as dangerous 
as for a lion-tamer in the cage with his pets. On 
the other hand, to have killed or seriously wounded 
one of the group would in all likelihood have meant 
at least a none-too-well housed delay of several years 
in my journey, for the courts of Mexico seldom ad- 
mit pleas of provocation from a " gringo." The 
group bawled after me and finally, when I was nearly 
a hundred yards beyond, the fellow fired four shots 
in my general direction. But as his bright new 
weapon, like so many furnished his class by our en- 
terprising arms factories, was made to sell rather 
than to shoot, and his marksmanship was distinctly 
tempered with mescal fumes, the four bullets harm- 
lessly kicked up the dust at some distance on as many 
sides of me, with danger chiefly to the several groups 
of frightened peasants cowering behind all the rocks 
and rises of ground in the vicinity. 

The dangers of the road in Mexico are chiefly 
from peons mixed with fire-water. When he is sober, 
the native's attitude verges on the over-cautious. 
But it is a double danger to the wandering " gringo," 
for the reason above mentioned, while the native who 
kills a foreigner not infrequently escapes with im- 
punity, and " gun toting " is limited now among all 
classes of the men only by the disparity between their 
wealth and the price of a weapon. 

As I passed on over the rise of ground ahead, 



160 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

huddled groups of men, women, and children fell in 
after me as if for protection from their own peo- 
ple. At dusk I entered Paracho with a good thirty 
miles behind me. It was a quaint little town in a 
lap of valley surrounded by pined hills and with the 
overhanging Japanese eaves peculiar to the region. 
The inhabitants were entirely peons and Indians, 
none in " European " dress. The vision of being 
carried into the place with a few stray bits of lead 
lodged in one's anatomjr was not alluring, and the 
dark dirty little cdrcel on the plaza looked equally 
uninteresting. 

I turned in at the " Meson de la Providencia." 
The keeper gave his attention chiefly to his little 
liquor and corn shop wide-opening on the street. 
There were several large rooms above, however, fac- 
ing the great corral where mules and asses were 
munching and arrieros had spread their straw and 
blankets for the night, and in at least one of them 
was not merely a wooden-floored cot but two sheets 
to go with it. I bathed in the tin washbasin and 
turned out redressed for a turn through the town. 
It swarmed with liquor-shops. Apparently any one 
with nothing else to do could set up a little drunkery 
or street stand without government interference. 
There was no pulque, the maguey being unknown to 
the region, but bottled mescal and aguardiente de 
cana amply made up for it. It seemed uncanny that 
one could talk with ease to these unlettered dwellers 




Fall plowing near Patzcuaro 




Modern transportation along the ancient highway from Tzintzun- 
tzan, the former -Tarascan capital 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 163 

in the wilderness in the same tongue learned in a 
peaceful class-room of the far North. A towsled 
woman or child drifted now and then into the meson 
shop to buy a Mexican-cent's worth of firewood. 
The woman who kept the shanty fonda down the 
street boasted of having lived nineteen months in 
California in her halcyon days, but was obliged to 
borrow enough of me in advance to buy the ingre- 
dients of the scanty supper she finally prepared. By 
eight the corral was snoring with arrieros and I 
ascended to my substantial couch. 

A wintry cold of the highlands hung over Paracho 
when dawn crawled in to find me shivering under a 
light blanket. As I left the place behind, the sun 
began to peer through the crest pines of a curiously 
formed mountain to the east, and to rend and tear 
the heavy fog banks hanging over the town and val- 
ley. Peons tight-wrapped in their blankets from 
eyes to knees slipped noiselessly past. There was a 
penetrating chill in the air, the fields were covered 
white with what seemed to be hoar frost, and the 
grassy way was wet with dew as after a heavy 
shower. 

Within half an hour the way began to rise and 
soon entered an immense pine forest without a sign 
of habitation. Tramping was delightful through 
what seemed a wild, untamed, and unteutonized Harz, 
with only the faint road and an occasional stump to 
show man had passed that way before. Huge birds 



164 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

circled majestically over the wooded hills and valleys 
of which the trail caught frequent brief but wide vis- 
tas. The road would have just suited Hazlitt, for 
it never left off winding, both in and out through the 
whispering forest and in and out of itself by num- 
berless paths, often spreading over a hundred yards 
of width, and rolling and pitching like a ship at sea. 
As in most of Mexico, wheeled traffic would here have 
been impossible. 

By eight I could stuff my coat into my knapsack. 
The day's journey was short, and twice I lay an 
hour on a grassy knoll gazing at the birds and lei- 
surely drifting clouds above and listening to the soft 
whispering of the pines. Then an unraveled trail 
led gradually downward, fell in with a broad sandy 
" road " that descended more sharply to a still swifter 
cobbled way, and about me grew up a land reminiscent 
of Ceylon, with many frail wooden houses on either 
side among banana groves, fruit for sale before them, 
and frequent streams of clear water babbling past. 
But it was only half-tropical, and further down the 
way was lined with huge trees resembling the elm. 

Uruapan was just high enough above the real 
tropics to be delightful. The attitude of its people, 
too, was pleasing. If not exactly friendly, they 
lacked that sour incommunicativeness of the higher 
plateau. Very few were in modern 1 costume and to 
judge from the crowd of boys that gathered round 
me as I wrote my notes in a plaza bench, the arrival 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 165 

of a white man in this largely Indian town was an 
event not to be slighted. There was a general air of 
more satisfaction with life in the languid country 
place where nature rewards all labor quickly and well, 
and where nearly all have gardens and orchards of 
their own to make them independent of working for 
others at a scanty wage. 

Its plaza lies a bit higher than the rest of the town, 
and from it straight streets of one-story houses, all 
of different slope, flow gently down, to be lost a few 
blocks away in greenery. The roofs of tile or a 
long untapered shingle are not flat, as elsewhere, but 
with a slope for the tropical rains. Patio life is well 
developed. Within the blank walls of the central 
portion all the rooms open on sun-flooded, inner gar- 
dens and whole orchards within which pass almost 
all the family activities, even to veranda dining- 
rooms in the edge of the shade. Dense groves of 
banana and coffee trees surround most of the un- 
crowded, adobe dwellings. In the outskirts the 
houses are of wood, with sharp-peaked roofs, and 
little hovels of mud and rubbish loll in the dense- 
black cool shadows of the productive groves and of 
the immense trees that are a feature of the place. 
Flowers bloom everywhere, and all vegetation is of 
the deepest green. On every side the town dies away 
into domesticated jungle beyond which lie such pine 
forests, vast corn fields, and washed-out trails as on 
the way thither from Zamora. 



166 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

There is not a " sight " of the slightest importance 
in Uruapan. But the place itself is a sight worth 
long travel, with its soft climate like the offspring 
of the wedded North and South, a balmy, gentle exist- 
ence where is only occasionally felt the hard reality 
of life that runs beneath, when man shows himself 
less kindly than nature. A man offered to sell me 
for a song a tract bordering the river, with a 
" house " ready for occupancy, and had the place 
and all that goes with it been portable we should 
quickly have come to terms. For Uruapan is espe- 
cially a beauty spot along the little Cupatitzio, where 
water clearer than that of Lake Geneva foams down 
through the dense vegetation and under little bridges 
quaint and graceful as those of Japan. 

The sanitary arrangements, of course, are Mexi- 
can. Women in bands wash clothes along the shady 
banks, both sexes bathe their light-chocolate skins in 
sunny pools, there were even horses being scrubbed 
in the transparent stream, and below all this others 
dipped their drinking water. Here and there the 
water was led off by many little channels and over- 
head wooden troughs to irrigate the gardens and to 
run little mills and cigarette factories. 

In the outskirts I passed the city slaughter-house. 
A low stone wall separated from the street a large 
corral ; with a long roof on posts, a stone floor, and a 
rivulet of water down through it occupying the cen- 
ter of the compound. The cattle, healthy, medium- 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 167 

sized steers worth fifteen dollars a head in this sec- 
tion, were lassoed around the horns and dragged 
under the roof, where another dexterously thrown 
noose bound their feet together and threw them on 
the stone floor. They were neither struck nor 
stunned in any way. When they were so placed that 
their throats hung over the rivulet, a butcher made 
one single quick thrust with a long knife near the col- 
larbone and into the heart. Boys caught the blood 
in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to 
various women hanging over the enclosing wall. The 
animal gave a few agonized bellows, a few kicks, and 
died. Each was quickly skinned and quartered, the 
more unsavory portions at once peddled along the 
wall, and bare-headed Indians carried a bleeding 
quarter on their black thick hair to the hooks on 
either side of pack horses which boys drove off to 
town as they were loaded. There the population 
bought strips and chunks of the still almost palpitat- 
ing meat, ran a string through an end of each piece, 
and carried it home under the glaring sun. 

All this is commonplace. But the point of the 
scene was the quite evident pleasure all concerned 
seemed to take in the unpleasant business. Most of 
us eat meat, but we do not commonly find our recrea- 
tion in slaughter-houses. Here whole crowds of 
boys, dogs, and noisy youths ran about the stone 
floor, fingering the still pulsating animal, mimicking 
its dying groans amid peals of laughter, wallowing 



168 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

in its ebbing blood, while fully as large an assem- 
blage of women, girls, and small children hung over 
the wall in a species of ecstatic glee at the oft-re- 
peated drama. Death, especially a bloody one, ap- 
peared to awaken a keen enjoyment, to quicken the 
sluggard pulse of even this rather peaceful Tarascan 
tribe. One could easily fancy them watching with 
the same ebullient joy the dying struggles of help- 
less human beings butchered in the same way. The 
killing of the trussed and fallen animal over the rivu- 
let recalled the cutting out of the heart of human vic- 
tims on the sacrificial stones amid the plaudits of the 
Aztec multitude and the division of the still quiv- 
ering flesh among them, and the vulgar young fellows 
running around, knife in hand, eager for an oppor- 
tunity to use them, their once white smocks smeared 
and spattered with blood, brought back the picture 
of the savage old priests of the religion of Monte- 
zuma. The scene made more comprehensible the 
preconquest customs of the land, as the antithesis 
of the drunken and excited Indian to the almost 
effeminate fear of the same being sober makes more 
clear that inexplicable piece of romance, the Con- 
quest of Mexico. 

There is less evidence of " religion " in Uruapan 
than in Zamora. Priests were rarely seen on the 
streets and the church bells were scarcely trouble- 
some. Peons and a few of even higher rank, how- 
ever, never passed the door of a church even at a dis- 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 169 

tance without raising their hats. Twice during the 
day I passed groups of women of the peon class 
carrying in procession several framed chromo rep- 
resentations of Saint Quien Sabe, bearing in his arms 
an imaginary Christ child, all of them wailing and 
chanting a dismal dirge as they splashed along 
through the dust in their bare feet. 

A Tragedy : As I returned in the soft air of sun- 
set from the clear little river boiling over its rocks, 
I passed in a deep-shaded lane between towering ba- 
nana, coffee, and larger trees about three feet of 
Mexican in sarape and overgrown hat rooted to a 
certain spot and shedding copious tears, while on the 
ground beside him were the remnants of a glazed pot 
and a broad patch of what had once been native fire- 
water mingled with the thirsty sand. Some distance 
on I heard a cry as of a hunted human being and 
turned to see the pot remnants and the patch in the 
self-same spot, but the hat and the three feet of 
Mexican under it were speeding away down the lane 
on wings of terror. But all in vain, for behind 
stalked at even greater speed a Mexican mother, 
gaining on him who fled, like inexorable fate, not 
rapidly but all too surely. 

The only train out of Uruapan leaves at an un- 
earthly hour. The sun was just peering over the 
horizon, as if reconnoitering for a safe entrance, 
when I fought my way into a chiefly peon crowd 
packed like a log-jam around a tiny window barely 



170 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

waist high, behind which some unseen but plainly 
Mexican being sold tickets more slowly than Ameri- 
can justice in pursuit of the wealthy. For a couple 
of miles the way lay across a flat rich land of corn- 
fields, pink with cosmos flowers. Then the train be- 
gan to creak and grind upward at dog-trot pace, 
covering four or five times what would have been the 
distance in a straight line and uncovering broad vis- 
tas of plump-formed mountains shaggy with trees, 
and vast, hollowed-out valleys flooded with corn. 
Soon there were endless pine forests on every hand, 
with a thick, oak-like undergrowth. A labyrinth of 
loops one above another brought us to Ajambaran 
and a bit of level track, with no mountains in the 
landscape because we stood on the summit of them. 
Little Lake Zirahuen, surrounded on all sides by slop- 
ing hills, half pine, half corn, gleamed with an emer- 
ald blue. The train half circled it, at a considerable 
distance, giving several broad vistas, each lower than 
the preceding, as we climbed to an animated box-car 
station higher still. From there we began to de- 
scend. Over the divide was a decided change in the 
landscape; again that dry, brown, thinly vegetated 
country of most of the Mexican highlands. Miles 
before we reached the town of the same name, beau- 
tiful Lake Patzcuaro burst on our sight through a 
break in the hills to the left, and continued to glad- 
den the eyes until we drew up at the station. 

While the rest of the passengers repaired to the 




In the church of ancient Tzintzuntzan is a "Descent from the 
Cross" ascribed to Titian 




Indians waiting outside the door of the priest's house in Tzintzuntzan 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 173 

mule-tram, I set off afoot for the town, a steady 
climb of two miles by a cobbled road, up the center 
of which runs a line of large stones worn flat by gen- 
erations of bare feet. The man who baedekerized 
Mexico says it is a " very difficult " trip afoot. 
Perhaps it would be to him. From the central line 
of flat stones there ran out, every yard, at right 
angles, lines of stones a bit smaller, the space be- 
tween being filled in with small cobbles, with grass 
growing between them. The sun was powerful in 
this thin atmosphere of more than seven thousand 
feet elevation. I was barely settled in the hotel when 
the mule-tram arrived. 

Patzcuaro is one of the laziest, drowsiest, most 
delightful pimples on the earth to be found in a long 
search. It has little in common with Uruapan. 
Here is not a suggestion of the tropics, but just a 
large Indian village of mud and adobe houses and 
neck-breaking, cobbled streets, a town older than 
time, sowed on and about a hillside backed by pine- 
treed peaks, with several expanses of plazas, all 
grown to grass above their cobbled floors, shaded by 
enormous ash-like trees with neither flowers, shrubs, 
nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere of 
roominess. About them run portales, arcades with 
pillars that seem at least to antedate Noah, and mas- 
sive stone benches green with age and water-logged 
with constant shade, as are also the ancient stone 
sidewalks under the trees and the overhanging roofs 



174 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

of one-story houses supported by carved beams. 
Along these wanders a chiefly peon population, soft- 
footed and silent, with a mien and manner that seems 
to murmur : " If I do not do it to-day there is to- 
morrow, and next week, and the week after." The 
place is charming ; not to its inhabitants perhaps, but 
to us from a land where everything is distressingly 
new. To the man who has anything to do or a de- 
sire to do anything, Patzcuaro would be infernal; 
for him who has nothing to do but to do nothing, it 
is delightful. 

Those who wish may visit crooning old churches 
more aged than the plays of Shakespeare. Or one 
may climb to " Calvary." The fanatical inhabitants, 
abetted by the wily priests, have named a road, 
" very rocky and very hilly," according to the Mexi- 
can Baedeker, leading to a knoll somewhat above the 
town, the " via dolorosa," and have scattered four- 
teen stations of plastered mud nitches along the way. 
From the aged, half-circular, stone bench on the sum- 
mit is another of the marvelous views that abound in 
Mexico. It was siesta-time, and not a human being 
was in sight to break the spell. The knoll fell away 
in bushy precipitousness to the plain below. As I 
reached the top, two trains, bound back the way I 
had come, left the station two miles away, one be- 
hind the other, and for a long time both were plainly 
visible as they wound in and out away through the 
foothills, yet noiseless from here as phantoms, and no 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 175 

blot on the landscape, since all colors, even that of a 
railroad cutting, blended into the soft-brown whole. 

The scene was wholly different from that about 
Uruapan, 1700 feet lower. There was very little 
green, and nothing at all of jungle ; only a sun-faded 
brown tapestry backed by a jumble of low mountains 
covered with short bristling pines. Here and there 
a timid, thin-blue peak peered over a depression in 
the chain. A panoramic glance, starting from the 
west, showed range after range, one behind the other, 
to the dimmest blue distance. Swinging round the 
horizon, skipping the lake, the eye took in a continu- 
ous procession of hills, more properly the upper por- 
tions of mountains, losing their trees toward the east 
and growing more and more bare and reddish-brown, 
until it fell again on the doddering old town napping 
in its hollow down the slope. Below the abrupt face 
of " Calvario," the plain, with a few patches of still 
green corn alternating with reddish, plowed fields but 
for the most part humped and bumped, light wooded 
with scrub pine, was sprinkled with mouse-sized cat- 
tle, distinct even to their spots and markings in this 
marvelous, clear air of the highlands, lazily swinging 
their tails in summer contentment. 

But the center of the picture, the picture, indeed, 
for which all the rest served as frame, was Lake 
Patzcuaro. It is not beautiful, but rather inviting, 
enticing, mysterious for its many sandy promon- 
tories, its tongues of mountains cutting off a farther 



176 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

arm of the lake with the old Tarascan capital, and 
above all for its islands. One of these is flat, run- 
ning out to sand at either end, and with something 
of an old town among the trees covering its slightly 
humped middle. Then there is Xanicho, pitched 
high in mound-shape, suggestive of Capri, rocky, 
bare, reddish-brown, and about its bottom, like a nar- 
row band on a half-sunken Mexican hat, a long thin 
town of white walls and tiled roofs visible in all de- 
tail, a church towering above the rest to form the bow 
of the ribbon. It is strange how the human plant 
grows everywhere and anywhere, even on a patch of 
rock thrust forth out of the sea. A bit to the east 
and farther away lies a much smaller island of simi- 
lar shape, apparently uninhabited. Farther still 
there stands forth from the water a bare precipitous 
rock topped by a castle-like building suggesting 
Chillon ; and beyond and about are other islands of 
many shapes, but all flat and gray-green in tint, 
some so near shore as to blend with the promontories 
and seem part of the mainland, thereby losing their 
romance. 

Over all the scene was a light-blue, transparent 
sky, flecked only with a few snow-white whisps of 
clouds, like bits of the ostrich plume that hung over 
Uruapan in the far west, and from which a soft wind 
tore off now and then tiny pieces that floated slowly 
eastward. The same breeze tempered the sunny still- 
ness of the " Calvario," broken occasionally by the 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 177 

song of a happy shepherd boy in the shrub-clad hills 
and the mellow-voiced, decrepit, old church bells of 
Patzcuaro below. 

Some miles away from the town, at the far end of 
Lake Patzcuaro, behind the hills, lies the ancient In- 
dian village of Tzintzuntzan, at the time of the Con- 
quest the residence of the chief of the Tarascans and 
ruler of the kingdom of Michoacan, which was not 
subdued until ten years after the fall of Mexico. I 
planned to visit it next day. As I strolled around 
the unkempt plaza grande in a darkness only aug- 
mented by a few weak electric bulbs of slight candle- 
power, with scores of peons, male and female, 
wrapped like half-animated mummies in their blan- 
kets, even to their noses, I fell in with a German. 
He was a garrulous, self-complacent, ungraceful man 
of fifty, a druggist and " doctor " in a small town far 
down in Oaxaca State until revolutions began, when 
he had escaped in the garb of a peon, leaving most of 
his possessions behind. Now he wandered from town 
to town, hanging up his shingle a few days in each as 
an oculist. His hotel room was a museum. None 
can rival the wandering Teuton in the systematic col- 
lecting, at its lowest possible cost, of everything that 
could by any stretch of the imagination ever be of 
service to a traveler. This one possessed only a 
rucksack and a blanket-wrapped bundle, but in them 
he carried more than the average American would be 
caught in possession of in his own home. There were 



178 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

worn and greasy notebooks full of detailed informa- 
tion of the road, the cheapest hotels of every known 
town of Mexico, with the lowest possible price and 
the idiosyncrasies of their proprietors that might be 
played upon to obtain it, the exact cafe where the 
beer glasses grew tallest, the expenditures that might 
be avoided by a f oresighted manipulation ; there were 
shoes and slippers, sleeping garments for each degree 
of temperature, a cooking outfit, a bicycle-lamp with 
a chimney to read by, guns, gun-oil, gun-cleaners, 
flannel cloth to take the place of socks for tramping, 
vaseline to rub on the same — it would be madness to 
attempt a complete inventory, but he would be in- 
ventive indeed who could name anything that Teu- 
tonic pack did not contain in some abbreviated form, 
purchased somewhere second hand at a fourth its 
original cost. The German had learned that the 
parish priest of Tzintzuntzan wore glasses, and we 
parted agreed to make the trip together. 

Patzcuaro is summery enough by day, but only the 
hardy would dress leisurely at dawn. A fog as thick 
as cheese, more properly a descended cloud, enveloped 
the place, a daily occurrence which the local author- 
ities would have you think make it unusually health- 
ful. An ancient cobbled road leads up and over the 
first rise, then degenerates to the usual Mexican 
camino, a trail twisting in and out along a chaos of 
rocks and broken ground. The fog hung long with 
us and made impossible pictures of the procession of 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 179 

Tarascan Indians coming in from Tzintzuntzan with 
every species of red pottery, from cups to immense 
water-jars, in great nets on the backs of horses, asses, 
men, and women. Beyond the railroad the trail 
picked its way, with several climbs over rocky spur- 
ends, along the marshy edge of the lake, which was 
so completely surrounded by mud and reeds that I 
had to leave unfulfilled my promised swim in it. The 
trip was made endless by the incessant chatter of the 
" doctor," who rattled on in English without a break ; 
and when I switched him to German his tongue sped 
still faster, though fortunately more correctly. No 
wonder those become fluent linguists who can outdis- 
tance and outendure a man in his own tongue long 
before they have begun to learn it. 

Along the way we picked up any amount of shin- 
ing black obsidian, some in the form of arrow-heads 
and crude knives that bore out the statement that the 
Indians once even shaved with them. It was nearly 
eleven when we sighted, down among the trees on the 
lake shore, the squat church tower of the once capi- 
tal of Michoacan. A native we spoke with referred 
to it as a " ciudad," but in everything but name it 
was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but 
its main street a collection of mud, rags, pigs, and 
sunshine, and no evidence of what Prescott describes 
as splendid ruins. Earthquakes are not unknown, 
and the bells of the church, old as the conquest of 
Michoacan, hang in the trees before it. Inside, an 



180 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

old woman left her sweeping to pull aside the cur- 
tains of the reputed Titian, a " Descent from the 
Cross," while I photographed it from the pulpit, for 
which privilege the young peon sexton appeared in 
time to accept a silver coin. 

The German, with whom business always took pre- 
cedence over pleasure, had gone to find the house of 
the priest. When I reached the door of it on the 
blank main street, he was sitting on a wooden bench 
in the hallway with a dozen old women and peons. 
We were admitted immediately after, as befitted our 
high social standing. A plump little padre nearing 
sixty, of the general appearance of a well-stuffed 
grain sack draped in black robes, but of rather im- 
pressive features — and wearing glasses — greeted 
us with formality. The " doctor " drew a black case 
from his pocket, went through some hocuspocus with 
a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his 
Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, 
had proved to the startled curate that the glasses 
he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind 
within a month but for the rare fortune of this great 
Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical 
capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigar- 
ette after cigarette while my companion fitted an- 
other pair of crystals and tucked the dangerous ones 
away in his own case — for the next victim. He did 
not even venture to haggle, but paid the two dollars 
demanded with the alacrity of a man who recognizes 




A corner of Morelia, capital of Michoacan, and its ancient aqueduct 




The spot and hour in which Maximilian was shot, with the chapel 
since erected by Austria 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 183 

his good fortune, and to whom a matter of a few 
pesos more or less is of slight importance. For were 
there not a score of Indians waiting outside eager to 
pay as well for masses, confessions, and all the rest 
of his own hocuspocus? There followed a social 
chat, well liquefied, after which we took our cere- 
monious leave. Once outside, I learned the distress- 
ing fact that the shape of the padre's bows had re- 
quired crystals costing twelve cents, instead of the 
customary nine-cent ones. 

The German set off in the blazing noonday at his 
swiftest pace. He was obliged to be back at the ho- 
tel by three, for the dinner must be paid for whether 
eaten or not. I fell behind, glad of the opportunity. 
Many groups of peons were returning now, without 
their loads, but maudlin and nasty tempered with the 
mescal for which they had exchanged them. My au- 
tomatic was within easy reach. The oculist had 
criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He 
carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and 
filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might 
split and spread on entering a body. In the out- 
skirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me 
a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense 
rock in his hand. I reached for my weapon, but he 
greeted me with a respectful " Adios ! " and hurried 
on. Soon he was overtaken by two more youths and 
dragged back to where an older peon lay in the mid- 
dle of the road, his head mashed with a rock until 



184 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

trickles of brain protruded. The event seemed to 
cause little excitement. A few stood at their doors 
gazing with a mild sort of interest at the corpse, 
which still lay in the road when I turned a corner 
above. 

Mules drag the tram-car of Patzcuaro laboriously 
up the three kilometers from the station to the main 
plaza, but gravitation serves for the down journey. 
When enough passengers had boarded it to set it in 
motion, we slid with a falsetto rumble down the cob- 
bled road, a ragged boy leaning on the brake. Be- 
yond the main railroad track a spur ran out on a 
landing-stage patched together out of old boards and 
rubbish. Peons were loading into an iron scow bags 
of cement from an American box-car far from home. 
Indians paddled about the lake in canoes of a hol- 
lowed log with a high pointed nose, but chopped 
sharp off at the poop. Their paddles were perfectly 
round pieces of wood, like churn-covers, on the end of 
long slim handles. 

We were soon off for Morelia, capital of the State, 
across plains of cattle, with an occasional cut through 
the hills and a few brown ponds. At one station we 
passed two carloads of soldiers, westbound. They 
were nearly all mere boys, as usual, and like the po- 
licemen and rurales of the country struck one as un- 
wisely entrusted with dangerous weapons. Morelia 
is seen afar off in the lap of a broad rolling plain, 
her beautiful cathedral towers high above all the rest. 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 185 

It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked 
the mile into town. 

The birthplace of Jose Morelos and of Yturbide, 
first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea 
and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and 
brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, 
with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of 
Patzcuaro and Uruapan. From the " centro " — 
the nerve-center of the " torpid State," with two 
well-kept plazas, the plateresque cathedral of a pink- 
ish stone worn faint and spotted with time, and the 
" seat of the powers of the State," all on the summit 
of a knoll — the entire town slopes gently down and 
quickly fades away into dirty, half-cobbled suburbs, 
brown and treeless, overrun with ragged, dust-tinted 
inhabitants, every street seeming to bring up against 
the low surrounding range. Its natural advantages 
are fully equal to those of Guadalajara, but here 
pulque grows and man is more torpid. All the place 
has a hopeless, or at least ambitionless, air, though in 
this splendid climate poverty has less tinge of misery 
and the appearance of a greater contentment with its 
lot. There is a local " poet's walk " that is not par- 
ticularly poetic, a wild park beyond that is more so, 
and a great aqueduct over which sprawl enormous 
masses of the beautiful purple bourgainvillea. This 
ancient waterway resembles, but is far less striking 
than that of Segovia, for it runs across compar- 
atively level ground and has only single arches of 



186 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

moderate height and too polished construction, in- 
stead of the massive cyclopean work of immense 
blocks of stone without mortar of its Spanish coun- 
terpart. Views and sunsets too often tempt the 
traveler in Mexico, or I might mention that from a 
little way out of town at the top of the road to 
Mexico City, where the cathedral towers all but 
reach the crest of the backing range, over which 
hung the ocher and light-pink and saffron-yellow 
clouds of the dying day. 

The " Hotel Soledad " asserted its selectness by 
the announcement : " En este hotel no se admiten 
companias de comicos ni toreros," but the solitude 
of its wooden-floored beds at least was distinctly 
broken and often. The pompous, squeeze-centavo, 
old landlady sat incessantly in her place near the 
door between dining-room and kitchen, with a leather 
handbag from which she doled out, almost with tears, 
coppers for change and the keys to the larder, to the 
cringing servants and conferred long with them in 
whispers on how much she dared charge each guest, 
according to his appearance. But at least Mexico 
feeds well the traveler who is too hungry to be par- 
ticular. He who will choose his dishes leads a sorry 
life, for the hotels are adamant in their fare and 
restaurants are almost unknown, except the dozens 
of little outdoor ones about the market-places where 
a white man would attract undue 'attention — if 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 187 

nothing less curable — among the " pela'os " that 
make up 80 per cent, of the population. 

The passengers to Acambaro included two ladies 
of the fly-by-night species, who whiled away a some- 
what monotonous journey by discussing the details 
of their profession with the admiring train-boy and 
drumming up trade in a coquettish pantomime. The 
junction town was in fiesta, and the second-class car 
of the evening train to Celaya was literally stacked 
high with peons and their multifarious bundles, and 
from it issued a stench like unto that of a congress 
of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of 
cinders and the cold night air swirling about me un- 
til the festive natives thinned down enough to give 
me admittance. By that time we were drawing into 
Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebra- 
tion. 

Like many another Mexican city the traveler 
chances into when the central plaza is bubbling with 
night life, light, and music, Celaya turned out rather 
a disappointment in the sunny commonplace of day. 
Its central square is a little garden, but almost all the 
rest of the town is a monotonous waste of square, 
bare, one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and 
no roofs — at least to be seen — each differing a bit 
from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up 
company of soldiers. The blazing sun and thick 
dust characteristic of all the high central plateau are 



188 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

here in full force. Like most Spanish things — con- 
quests, history, buildings — it looked more striking 
at a distance than when examined in detail. 

Celaya is far-famed for its candy. All over the 
republic sounds the cry of " Cajetas de Celaya!" 
Mexico shows a great liking for sweets ; no block is 
complete without its little stands or peregrinating 
hawkers of all manner of temptations to the sweet- 
toothed, ranging from squares of " fudge " in all 
colors of the rainbow to barber-pole sticks a half- 
yard long. The station was surrounded with soap- 
less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale 
all sizes of the little wooden boxes of the chief local 
product, in appearance like axle-grease, but delicious 
far beyond its looks, and with vendors of everything 
imaginable, to say nothing of a ragged, dirty multi- 
tude of all ages with no business there — nor any- 
where else. 

When I had spread out over two wooden seats 6f 
the big, bustling El Paso Limited I was quickly re- 
minded of the grim, business-bent, American engi- 
neer in gray hair, the unlit half of a cigar clamped 
tightly between his teeth, I had caught a half-con- 
scious glance of in the cab window. One could liter- 
ally feel his firm American hand at the throttle as 
the heavy train gathered steady headway and raced 
away to the eastward. Across the car sat two hand- 
some, solidly-knit young bull-fighters, their little 
rat-tail coletas peering from behind their square-cut 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 189 

hats. We sped steadily across the sun-flooded, dry, 
brown plateau, slightly rolling, its fields alternating 
between the dead tint of dry corn and newly plowed 
patches. Here for the first time were pulque pro- 
ducing fields of maguey, planted in long, straight, 
emerald-green rows. 

As Irapuato for its strawberries, and Celaya for 
its sweets, so Queretaro is famed for its huge, cheap 
hats, of a sort of reed, large enough to serve as um- 
brellas, and for its opals. From the time he steps 
off the train here until he boards it again, the 
traveler, especially the " gringo," is incessantly pes- 
tered by men and boys offering for sale these worth- 
less bright pebbles — genuine and otherwise. Here 
again are the same endless rows of one-story, stucco 
houses, intersecting cobbled and dust-paved streets, 
running to the four corners of the compass from a 
central plaza planted with tall, slim trees, the inter- 
woven branches of which almost completely shade it. 
The cathedral houses, among other disturbing, dis- 
gusting, and positively indecent representations of 
the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the 
Aztec style of bloody realism, a life-size Cristo with 
masses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length 
knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy 
the place weighed down by a Puritan censorship. 
The local museum contains among other rubbish of 
the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered 
in 1810 the words that started the revolution against 



190 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Spanish power ! Here, too, is what purports to be 
an authentic photograph of the execution of Maxi- 
milian, theatrical to a Spanish degree, the three vic- 
tims standing in their places, the once " Emperor of 
the Mexicans " holding a large crucifix, and several 
of the boy soldiers who executed them crowded 
eagerly into the corners of the picture. More im- 
pressive to the incredulous is the plain, tapering, 
wooden coffin in which the chief body was placed, the 
bottom half covered with faded blood and on one of 
the sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if 
the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise 
from the dead. The portrait of the transplanted 
scion of Austria shows a haughty, I-am-of-superior- 
clay man, of a distinctly mediocre grade of intellect, 
with a forest of beard that strives in vain to conceal 
an almost complete absence of chin. 

History records that the deposed ruler reached by 
carriage his last earthly scene in the early morning 
of June 19, 1867. I arrived as early, though afoot. 
It is a twenty-minute walk from the center of town 
across the flat, fertile vega, green with gardens, to 
the Cerro de las Campanas, a bare, stern, stony hill, 
somewhat grown with cactus bushes, maguey, and 
tough shrubs, rising perhaps seventy feet above the 
level of the town. It runs up gently and evenly from 
the south, but falls away abruptly in a cragged, rock 
precipice on the side facing Queretaro, providing the 
only place in the vicinity where poorly aimed bullets 




The market of Tlaxcala, the ancient inhabitants of which aided 
Cortez in the Conquest of Mexico 




A rural of the state of Tlaxcala on guard before a barracks 



ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACAN 193 

cannot whistle away across the plain. Before them, 
as they faced the youthful, brown file of soldiers in 
their many-patched and faded garb, the three had a 
comprehensive view of the town, chiefly trees and 
churches sufficient to house the entire populace sev- 
eral times over. Nine immense structures, each with 
a great dome and a tower or two — steeples are un- 
known in Mexico — stand out against the bare, 
brown, flat-topped range beyond that barely rises 
above the highest tower. The last scene he looked 
on must have struck the refuted emperor as typical 
of a country he was sorry then ever to have seen, in 
spite of his regal control of facial expression, — a 
hard, stony plateau, the fertility and riches of which 
succumb chiefly to an all-devouring priesthood. 
Cold lead plays too large a part in the history of 
Mexico, but certainly its most unjust verdict was 
not the extinction of the " divine right " in the per- 
son of this self-styled descendant of the Caesars at 
the hands of an Indian of Oaxaca. To-day a brown 
stone chapel, erected by Austria, stands where Maxi- 
milian fell, but the spot remains otherwise unchanged, 
and no doubt the fathers of these same peons who 
toiled now in the gardens of the vega under the morn- 
ing sun lined the way through which the carriage 
bore to its American extinction a system foreign to 
the Western Hemisphere. 



CHAPTER VI 

TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 

THE El Paso Limited picked me up again 
twenty-four hours later. Beyond Queretaro's 
ungainly aqueduct spread fields of tobacco, blooming 
with a flower not unlike the lily; then vast, almost 
endless stretches of dead, dry corn up low heights on 
either hand, and occasional fields of maguey in sol- 
dierly files. At San Juan del Rio, famous for its 
lariats, a dozen men and a woman stood in a row, 
some forty feet from the train, holding coils of 
woven-leather ropes of all sizes, but in glum and 
hopeless silence, while a policeman paced back and 
forth to prevent them from either canvassing the 
train- windows or crying their wares. Evidently 
some antinuisance crusade had invaded San Juan. 

Mexico is a country of such vast vistas that a man 
might easily be taken and executed by bandits within 
plain sight of his friends without their being able to 
lend him assistance. Nowhere can one look farther 
and see nothing. Yet entire companies of marauders 
might lie in wait in the many wild rocky barrancos 

of this apparently level brown plain. Up and up we 

194 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 195 

climbed through a bare, stone-strewn land, touched 
here and there with the green of cactus, sometimes 
with long vistas of maize, which here hung dead in its 
half-grown youth because of the failure of the sum- 
mer rains. Fields of maguey continued. The air 
grew preceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, 
always at good speed behind the American engineer, 
mounting to the upper plateau surrounding the capi- 
tal, not through mountains but by a vast, steadily 
rising world. Sometimes long, unmortared stone 
fences divided the landscape, more often mile after 
unobstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, 
tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into 
the north. 

A special train of soldiers, with a carload of arms 
and munitions, passed on the way to head off the 
latest revolted " general." The newspapers of the 
capital appeared, some rabidly " anti- American," 
stopping at nothing to stir up the excitable native 
against alleged subtle plans of the nation to the north 
to rob them of their territory and national existence, 
the more reputable ones with sane editorials implor- 
ing all Mexicans not to make intervention " in the 
name of humanity and civilization " necessary. The 
former sold far more readily. The train wound 
hither and yon, as if looking for an entrance to the 
valley of Mexico. Unfortunately no train on either 
line reaches ancient Anahuac by daylight, and my 
plan to enter it afoot, perhaps by the same route as 



196 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Cortez, had been frustrated. A red sun was just 
sinking behind haggard peaks when we reached the 
highest point of the line — 8237 feet above the sea — 
with clumps and small forests of stocky oaks and half 
Mexico stretching out behind us, rolling brown to 
distant bare ranges backed by others growing blue 
and purple to farthest distance. The scene had a 
late October aspect, and a chilling, ozone-rich wind 
blew. By dusk the coat I had all but thrown away 
in the sweltering North was more than needed. We 
paused at San Antonio, a jumble of human kennels 
thrown together of old cans, scraps of lumber, mud, 
stones, and cactus leaves, with huge stacks of the 
charcoal, with the soot of which all the inhabitants 
were covered, even to the postmaster who came in per- 
son for the mail sack. That week's issue of a frivol- 
ous sheet of the capital depicted an antonino char- 
coal-burner standing before his no less unwashed wife, 
holding a new-born babe and crying in the slovenly 
dialect of the "pela'o": "Why, it is white! 
Woman, thou hast deceived me ! " 

At dark came Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs, 
after which night hid all the scene there might have 
been, but for glimpses by the light of the train of 
the great tajo cut through the hills to drain the 
ancient valley of Anahuac. On we sped through the 
night, which if anything became a trifle warmer. 
Gradually the car crowded to what would have been 
suffocation had we not soon pulled in at Buena Vista 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 197 

station, to fight our way through a howling pande- 
monium of touts, many shouting English, among 
whom were the first Negroes I had seen in Mexico. 

Mexico City was a great disappointment. The 
hotel only a block from the cathedral and the site of 
the great teocalli of the Aztecs, to which the German 
in Patzcuaro had directed me, differed not even in 
its smells from a Clark-street lodging-house in Chi- 
cago. The entire city with its cheap restaurants and 
sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and 
sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Span- 
ish in tongue. Even morning light discovered noth- 
ing like the charm of the rest of Mexico, and though 
I took up new lodgings en famille in aristocratic 
Chapultepec Avenue, with a panorama of snow- 
topped Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, her sleep- 
ing sister, and all the range seeming a bare gunshot 
away, the imagination was more inclined to hark back 
to the Bowery than to the great Tenochtitlan of the 
days of Cortez. 

In a word, the capital is much like many another 
modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of popu- 
lation, with strong national lines of demarkation, 
and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, 
but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, 
Mme. Calderon, and the rest expects. Since anarchy 
fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession of car- 
riages of beauty in silks and jewels, and of rancheros 
prancing by in thousand-dollar hats, on silver- 



198 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

mounted and be jeweled saddles, has disappeared from 
the life of the capital. To-day the Mexican is not 
anxious to parade his wealth, nor even to venture it 
in business. He is much more minded to bury it in 
the earth, to hide it in his socks, to lay it up in the 
great republic to the north, where neither presidents 
corrupt nor Zapatistas break in and steal. 

By day moderate clothing was comfortable, but 
the night air is sharp and penetrating, and he who is 
not dressed for winter will be inclined to keep mov- 
ing. Policemen and street-car employees tie a cloth 
across their mouths from sunset until the morning 
warms. Ragged peons swarm, feeding, when at all, 
chiefly from ambulating kitchens of as tattered haw- 
kers. The well-to-do Mexican, the " upper class," 
in general is a more churlish, impolite, irresponsible, 
completely inefficient fellow than even the country- 
man and the peon, in whom, if anywhere within its 
borders, lies the future hope of Mexico. To him 
outward appearance is everything, and the capital is 
especially overrun with the resultant hollow baubles 
of humanity. 

There are a few short excursions of interest about 
the capital. Bandits have made several of them, 
such as the ascent of Popocatepetl, unpopular, but a 
few were still within the bounds of moderate safety. 
Three miles away by highway or street-car looms 
up the church of Guadalupe, the sacred city of Mex- 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 199 

ico. It is a pleasing little town, recalling Puree 
of the Juggernaut-car by its scores of little stands 
for the feeding of pilgrims — at pilgrimage prices. 
Here are evidences of an idolatry equal to that of 
the Hindu. Peons knelt on the floor of the church, 
teaching their babies to cross themselves in the long 
intricate manner customary in Mexico. A side room 
was crowded with cheap cardboard paintings of de- 
votees in the act of being " saved " by the Virgin of 
Guadalupe — here a man lying on his back in front 
of a train which the Virgin in the sky above has just 
brought to a standstill; there a child being spared 
by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about 
to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything 
more crude either in conception or execution than 
these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Vir- 
gin would make a dramatist of the first rank ; there 
was not a picture in which the miraculous assistance 
came a moment too soon, never a hero of our ancient, 
pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly " in 
the nick of time.'' The famous portrait of the mi- 
raculous being herself, over the high altar, is dimly 
seen through thick glass. Inside the chapel under 
the blue and white dome pilgrims were dipping up the 
" blessed " water from the bubbling well and filling 
bottles of all possible shapes, not a few of which had 
originally held American and Scotch whisky, that are 
sold in dozens of little stands outside the temple. 



200 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

These they carry home, often hundreds of miles, to 
" cure " the ailments of themselves or families, or to 
sell to others at monopoly prices. 

Good electric cars speed across amazingly fertile 
bottom lands crisscrossed by macadam highways to 
Xochimilco. Nearing it, the rugged foothills of the 
great mountain wall shutting in the valley begin to 
rise. We skirted Pedregal, a wilderness of lava hills 
serving as quarry, and drew up in the old Indian 
town, of a charm all its own, with its hoar and rug- 
ged old church and its houses built of upright corn- 
stalks or reeds, with roofs of grass from the lake. 
Indians paddled in clumsy, leaky boats about through 
the canals among rich, flower-burdened islands, once 
floating. 

Another car runs out to Popotla along the old 
Aztec causeway by which the Spaniards retreated on 
that dismal night of July 2, 1520. Now the water 
is gone and only a broad macadamed street remains. 
The spot where Alvarado made his famous pole-vault 
is near the Buena Vista station, but no jumping is 
longer necessary — except perhaps to dodge a pass- 
ing trolley. Instead of the lake of Tenochtitlan 
days there is the flattest of rich valleys beyond. 
The " Tree of the Dismal Night," a huge cypress 
under which Cortez is said to have wept as he 
watched the broken remnants of his army file past, 
is now hardly more than an enormous, hollow, burned- 
out stump, with a few huge branches that make it 




A part of Puebla, looking toward the peak of Orizaba 




Popocatepetl and the artificial hill of Cholula on which the Aztecs 
had a famous temple, overthrown by Cortez 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 203 

look at a distance like a flourishing tree still in the 
green prime of life. The day was rainy and a cold, 
raw wind blew. The better-clad classes were in over- 
coats, and the peons in their cotton rags wound them- 
selves in blankets, old carpets, newspapers, anything 
whatever, huddling in doorways or any suggestion of 
shelter. Cold brings far more suffering in warm 
countries than in these of real winters. 

The comandante of notorious old Belen prison 
in the capital spoke English fluently, but he did not 
show pleasure at my visit. An under-official led me 
to the flat roof, with a bird's-eye view of the miser- 
able, rambling, old stone building. Its large patios 
were literally packed with peon prisoners. The life 
within was an almost exact replica of that on the 
streets of the capital, even to hawkers of sweets, fruit- 
vendors, and the rest, while up from them rose a 
decaying stench as from the steerage quarters of 
old transatlantic liners. Those who choose, work at 
their trade within as outside. By night the prison- 
ers are herded together in hundreds from six to six 
in the wretched old dungeon-like rooms. Nothing 
apparently is prohibited, and prisoners may indulge 
with impunity in anything from cigarettes to adult- 
ery, for which they can get the raw materials. 

The excursion out to the Ajusco range, south of 
the city, was on the verge of danger. Zapata hung 
about Cuernavaca and marauders frequently ap- 
proached the very outskirts of the capital. Under 



204 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

our knapsacks we struck upward through the stony 
village where the train had set us down, and along a 
narrow road that soon buried itself in pine forests. 
A bright clear stream came tumbling sharply down, 
and along this we climbed. A mile or more but we 
picked up at a thatched hut an Indian boy of ten as 
burden-bearer and guide, though we continued to 
carry most of our own stuff and to trust largely to 
our own sense of direction. Above came a three- 
hour climb through pine-forested mountains, such as 
the Harz might be without the misfortune of German 
spick and spanness. He who starts at an elevation 
of 7500 feet and climbs 4000 upward in a brief space 
of time, with a burden on his back, knows he is mount- 
ing. Occasionally a dull-gray glimpse of the hazy 
valley of Mexico broke through the trees ; about us 
was an out-of-the-way stillness, tempered only by the 
sound of birds. About noon the thick forest of great 
pine trees ceased as suddenly as if nature had drawn 
a dead-line about the brow of the mountain. A foot 
above it was nothing but stunted oak growths and 
tufts of bunch-grass large as the top of a palm-tree. 
On the flat summit, with hints through the tree-tops 
below of the great vale of Anahuac, we halted to share 
the bulk of our burdens with the Indian boy, who 
had not brought his " itacate." The air was 
most exhilarating and clear as glass, though there 
was not enough of it to keep us from panting madly 
at each exertion. In the shade it was cold even in 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 205 

heavy coats ; but merely to step out into the sun- 
shine was to bask like lizards. 

Our " guide " lost no time in losing us, and we 
started at random down the sharp face of the moun- 
tain to the valley 4000 feet almost directly below us. 
Suddenly a break in the trees opened out a most 
marvelous view of the entire valley of Mexico. Po- 
pocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl stood out as clearly 
under their brilliant white mantles of new-fallen snow 
as if they were not sixty but one mile away, every 
crack and seam fully visible, and the fancied likeness 
of the second to a sleeping woman was from this 
point striking. The contrast was great between the 
dense green of the pine forests and the velvety, brown 
plain with its full, shallow lakes unplumbed fathoms 
below. Farther down we came out on the very 
break-neck brink of a vast amphitheater of hills, with 
" las ventanas," huge, sheer, rock cliffs shaped like 
great cathedral windows, an easy stone-throw away 
but entirely inaccessible to any but an aviator, for 
an unconscionable gorge carpeted with bright green 
tree-tops lay between. I proposed descending the 
face of the cliff below us, and led the way down a 
thousand feet or more, only to come to the absolutely 
sheer rock end of things where it would have taken 
half the afternoon to drop to the carpet of forest 
below. 

There was nothing to do but to climb out again 
and skirt the brink of the canyon. In the rare air 



206 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

we were certain a score of times of being about to 
drop dead from exhaustion, yet a two-minute rest 
always brought full recovery. Then came a wild 
scramble of an hour along sheer rocks thick draped 
with moss that pealed off in square yards almost as 
often as we stepped on it, and threatened to drop us 
more than a half-mile to the tree-tops below. Climb- 
ing, clinging, and circling through a wilderness of un- 
dergrowth amid the vast forest of still, dense-green 
pines, but with such views of the valley of Mexico 
and the great snow-clads as to reward any possible 
exertion, we flanked at last the entire canyon. In the 
forest itself every inch of ground was carpeted with 
thick moss, more splendid than the weavings of any 
loom of man, into which the feet sank noiselessly. 
Everywhere the peaceful stillness was tempered only 
by a slight humming of the trees, and the songs of 
myriad birds, not a human being within screaming 
distance, unless some gang of bandits stalked us in 
the depth of the forest. More likely they were by 
now sodden with the aftermath of Sunday festivities, 
and anyway we were armed " hasta los dientes." 

At length, as the day was nearing its close, we fell 
into what had once been a trail. It was moss-grown 
and wound erratically in and out among the trees, 
but went steadily down, very level compared to the 
work of the preceding hours, yet so steep we several 
times spread out at full length to slide a rod or more. 
The sun was setting when we came to the bottom of 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 207 

" las ventanas " only a couple thousand feet from 
where we had first caught sight of them hours before. 
Thereafter the trail moderated its pace and led us to 
the most beautiful thing of the day, a clear ice-cold 
stream at the bottom of the cliffs. We all but drank 
it dry. Then on out of the canyon and across a 
vast field of rye, back of which the great gorge stood 
like some immense stadium, with stalwart athletic 
pines filling all the seats. This is the spot where 
Wallace's " Fair God " burst forth upon the valley. 
We descended between immense walls of pines, half 
unseen in the dusk and framing a V-shaped bit of the 
vale of Anahuac, a perfect crimson fading to rose 
color, culminating in the pink-tinted snow-clads 
above. 

At dark we left the boy at his hut, on the walls 
of which his father had just hung the two deer of 
that day's hunt. There was no hope of catching 
the afternoon train from Cuernavaca, and we laid 
plans to tramp on across the valley floor to Tizapan. 
But Mexican procrastination sometimes has its vir- 
tues, and we were delighted to find the station crowded 
with those waiting for the delayed convoy that ten 
minutes later was bearing us cityward through the 
cool highland night. 

I had hoped to walk from Mexico City to the capi- 
tal of Honduras. That portion of the route from 
former Tenochtitlan to Oaxaca and the Isthmus of 
Tehuantepec, however, was not then a promising 



208 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

field for tramping by any one with any particular 
interest in arriving. I concluded to flank it by train. 
It was a chilly gray day when the little narrow-gage 
train bore us close by the miraculous temple of 
Guadalupe, with its hilltop cemetery and stone sails, 
and into the vast fields of maguey beyond. Peons 
and donkeys without number, the former close 
wrapped in their colored blankets, the latter looking 
as if they would like to be, enlivened the roads and 
trails. We skirted the shore of dull Lake Texcoco, 
once so much larger and even now only a few inches 
below the level of the flat plain, recalling that the 
Tenochtitlan of the Conquest was an island reached 
only by causeways. At San Juan Teotihuacan, the 
famous pyramids lost in the nebulous haze of pre- 
Toltec history bulked forth from the plain and for 
many miles beyond. The smaller, called that of the 
Moon, was a mere squat mound of earth. But the 
larger had lately been cleared off, and was now of a 
light cement color, rising in four terraces with a low 
monument or building on the summit. It contains 
about the same material as the pyramid of Cheops, 
but is larger at the base and by no means so high, 
thereby losing something of the majesty of its Egyp- 
tian counterpart. 

A cheery sun appeared, but the air remained cool. 
Fields of maguey in mathematically straight lines 
stretched up and away out of sight over broad rolling 
ridges. I had put off the experience of tasting the 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 209 

product until I should reach Apam, the center of the 
pulque industry. At that station an old woman 
sold me a sort of flower-pot full of the stuff at two 
cents. I expected to taste and throw it away. In- 
stead there came a regret that I had not taken to 
it long before. It was of the consistency and color 
of milk, with a suggestion of buttermilk in its taste 
and fully as palatable as the latter, with no notice- 
able evidence of intoxicating properties. No doubt 
this would come with age, as well as the sour stink 
peculiar to the pulquerias of the cities. 

The train made a mighty sweep to the northward 
to escape from the central valley, bringing a much 
closer and better view of the two snow-clads, first on 
one, then on the farther side. By choice I should 
have climbed up over the " saddle " between them, as 
Cortez first entered the realms of Montezuma. A 
dingy branch line bore us off across broken country 
with much corn toward Puebla. On the left was a 
view of Malinche, famous in the story of the Conquest, 
its summit hidden in clouds. I was now in the Rhode 
Island of Mexico, the tiny State of Tlaxcala, the 
" Land of Corn," to the assistance from which Cortez 
owes his fame. The ancient state capital of the 
same name has been slighted by the railway and only 
a few decrepit mule-cars connect it with the outer 
world. I slighted these, and leaving my possessions 
in the station of Santa Ana, set off through a rolling 
and broken, dry and dusty, yet fertile country, with 



210 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

the wind rustling weirdly through the dead brown 
fields of corn. The inhabitants of the backward 
little capital were even more than usually indifferent 
to " gringoes," seldom giving me more than a glance 
unless I asked a question, and even leaving me to 
scribble my notes in peace in a shaded plaza bench. 

There is nothing but its historical memories of spe- 
cial interest in Tlaxcala. It is a town of some 3000 
inhabitants, a few hundred feet higher than Mexico 
City, with many ancient buildings, mostly of stone, 
often mere ruins, from the seams of surely half of 
which sprout grass and flowers, as they do between 
the cobbles of its streets and its large rambling plaza. 
I visited the old church on the site of which Christi- 
anity — of the Spanish brand — was first preached 
on the American continent. Here was the same In- 
dian realism as elsewhere in the republic. One 
Cristo had " blood " pouring in a veritable river 
from his side, his face was completely smeared with it, 
his knees and shins were skinned and barked and cov- 
ered with blood, which had even dripped on his toes ; 
the elbows and other salient points were in worse con- 
dition than those of a wrestler after a championship 
bout, and the body was tattooed with many strange 
arabesques. There were other figures in almost as 
distressing a state. A god only ordinarily mal- 
treated could not excite the pity or interest of the 
Mexican Indian, whose every-day life has its own 
share of barked shins and painful adversities. It 




o 

>> 
o, 






TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 213 

was amusing to find this village, hardly larger than 
many a one about the home of Mexican hacendados, 
the capital of a State. But the squads of rurales 
and uniformed police and the civil employees of Gov- 
ernment were very solemn with their responsibilities. 
I had seen it all in an hour or two and drifted back 
along the five lazy miles to Santa Ana. Tlaxcala 
lies between two gaunt broken ridges, with rugged 
chains all about it, yet the little State is by no means 
so completely fenced in by nature as the imagination 
that has fed on Prescott pictures. 

Puebla, third city of Mexico, is even colder than 
the capital. The snow-clads of the latter look 
down upon it from the west, and far away to the 
east stands Orizaba, highest peak of Mexico. In 
the haze of sunset its great mantle of new-fallen 
snow stood out sharply, darker streaks that ran 
down through the lower reaches of snow dying out 
in nothingness, as the mountain did itself, for as a 
matter of fact the latter was not visible at all, but 
only the snow that covered its upper heights, sur- 
rounded above, below, and on all sides by the thin 
gray sky of evening. By night there was music in 
the plaza. But how can there be life and laughter 
where a half-dozen blankets are incapable of keep- 
ing the promenaders comfortable? In all the frigid 
town there was not a single fire, except in the little 
bricked holes full of charcoal over which the place 
does its cooking. Close to my hotel was the " Casa 



214 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Serdan," its windows all broken and its stucco front 
riddled with bullet holes, for it was here that two 
brothers, barricading themselves against the govern- 
ment of Porfirio Diaz, spilled the first blood of the 
long series of revolutions and worse that has fol- 
lowed. Already the name of the street had been 
changed to " Calle de los Martires de Noviembre, 
1910." 

It is nearly three hours' walk from the plaza of 
Puebla to that of Cholula, the Benares of the Aztecs, 
and for him who rises early it is a cold one. What 
little romance remains would have fled had I made 
the trip by mule-car. As it was, I could easily 
drop back mentally into the days of the Conquest, 
for under the brilliant cloudless sky as I surmounted 
a bit of height there lay all the historic scene be- 
fore me — the vast dipping plain with the ancient 
pyramid of Cholula, topped now by a white church 
with towers and dome, standing boldly forth across 
it, and beyond, yet seeming so close one half ex- 
pected an avalanche of their snows to come down 
upon the town, towering Popocatepetl and her sister, 
every little vale and hollow of the " saddle " be- 
tween clear as at a yard distance. Then to the left, 
Malinche and the rolling stony hills of Tlaxcala, 
along which the Spaniards advanced, with the beauti- 
ful cone of Orizaba rising brilliant and clear nearly 
a hundred miles away. The great rampart separat- 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 215 

ing them from the cherished valley must have brought 
bated breath even to the hardy soldiers of Cortez. 

This unsurpassed view accompanied all the rest 
of the peaceful morning walk. By nine I was climb- 
ing the great pyramid from the top of which the in- 
trepid Spaniard tumbled down the ancient gods, and 
about which occurred the first of the many whole- 
sale massacres of Indians on the American continent. 
To-day it is merely a large hill, overgrown on all 
sides with grass, trees, and flowers, and with almost 
nothing to bear out the tradition that it was man- 
built. From the top spreads a scene rarely sur- 
passed. Besides the four mountains, the ancient and 
modern town of Cholula lies close below, with many 
another village, especially their bulking churches, 
standing forth on all sides about the rich valley, 
cut up into squares and rectangles of rich-brown 
corn alternating with bright green, a gaunt, low, 
wall-like range cutting off the entire circle of the 
horizon. The faint music of church bells from many 
a town miles away rode by on a wind with the nip 
of the mountain snows in it. But Prescott has al- 
ready described the scene with a fidelity that seems 
uncanny from one who never beheld it except in his 
mind's eye. 

To-day the pyramid is sacred to the " Virgin of 
the Remedies." Gullible pilgrims come from many 
leagues around to be cured of their ills, and have 



216 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

left behind hundreds of doll-like figures of themselves 
or the ailing limb or member made of candle wax 
that breaks to bits between the fingers. Then there 
are huge candles without number, martyrs and cru- 
cifixions, with all the disgusting and bloody features 
of elsewhere; every kind and degree and shape and 
size of fetish. Cholula needs badly another Cortez 
to tumble her gods down to the plain below and drive 
out the hordes of priests that sacrifice their flocks 
none the less surely, if less bloodily, than their Aztec 
predecessors. 

A bright red sun came up as the train swung 
round to the eastward, hugging the flanks of Ma- 
linche, and rumbled away across a sandy, very 
dry, but fertile country, broken by huge barrancas 
or washouts, and often with maguey hedges. Most 
of my day was given up to Mr. — come to think 
of it, I did not even get his name. He drifted into 
the train at the junction and introduced himself by 
remarking that it was not bad weather thereabouts. 
He was a tall, spare man of fifty, in a black suit 
rather disarranged and a black felt hat somewhat 
the worse for wear. He carried a huge pressed- 
cardboard " telescope " and wore a cane, though it 
hardly seemed cold enough for one. His language 
was that of a half-schooled man, with the paucity 
of vocabulary and the grammar of a ship's captain 
who had left school early but had since read much 
and lived more. Whenever a noun failed him, which 




Looking down on Maltrata as the train begins its descent 




A residence of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 219 

was often, he filled in the blank with the word " propo- 
sition." Like myself, he traveled second-class be- 
cause there was no fourth. 

It may be that the biography which pieced it- 
self unconsciously together as he talked needs a 
sprinkle of salt here and there, but it all had the ear- 
marks of veracity. He was a Briton, once a sur- 
geon in the British army, with the rank of captain, 
saw service with Roberts in Egypt, and was with 
Kitchener at the relief of Khartum. Later he served 
in India with the Scotch Grays. He looked the 
part, and had, moreover, the accent and scars to go 
with it. Glimpses through his conversation into the 
background beyond suggested he had since been in 
most parts of the world. He liked Argentina best 
and the United States least, as a place of resi- 
dence. Practising as a physician and oculist, he had 
amassed a moderate fortune, all of which he had 
lost, together with his wife and child, and possibly 
a bit of his own wits, in the flood of Monterey. 
Since that catastrophe he had had no other ambi- 
tion than to earn enough to drift on through life. 
With neither money nor instruments left, he took to 
teaching English to the wealthier class of Mexicans 
in various parts of the country, now in mission 
schools, now as private tutor. A Methodist insti- 
tution in Queretaro had dispensed with his services 
because he protested against an order to make life 
unpleasant to those boys who did not respond with 



220 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

their spending money to a daily call for alms at 
the morning assembly. Six months ago he had 
drifted into a little town near San Marcos, wearing 
the title of " professor," and got together a class of 
private pupils, chief among them three daughters of 
a wealthy hacendado. Rebels came one day and in 
the exuberance that follows a full meal long delayed, 
with pulque embroidery, one of them fired two shots 
through the window not far from his venerable Brit- 
ish head. The " professor " picked up a two-foot 
mahogany ruler, marched out into the plaza and, 
rapping the startled rebel over the skull, took his 
rifle away from him and turned it over to the de- 
lighted! jefe politico. From then on his future 
seemed assured, for if the rest of the town was poor, 
the hacendado's wealth was only rivaled by his 
daughters' longing for English. 

But life is a sad proposition at best. On the Mon- 
day preceding our meeting the " professor " sat with 
his pupils in the shade of the broad hacienda veranda 
when he saw two priests wandering toward the 
house " like Jews with a pack of clothing to sell." 
" It 's all up with the Swede," he told himself ac- 
cording to his own testimony. The prophecy 
proved only too true. The padres had come to or- 
der that the three daughters be god-mothers to the 
" Cristo " (in the form of a gaudy doll) that was 
to be " born " in the town on Christmas eve and pa- 
raded to the cathedral of Puebla. As their ticket 



TENOCHTITLAN OF TO-DAY 221 

to heaven depended upon obedience, none of the faith- 
ful seiioritas dreamed of declining the honor, even 
though it involved the expenditure of considerable of 
papa's good money and required them to spend most 
of the time until Christmas rehearsing for the cere- 
mony and " praising the glory of God " with the 
priests in a room of the church, locked against 
worldly intruders. Naturally this left them no time 
for English. His mainstay gone, the " professor " 
threw up the sponge and struck out for pastures new, 
carrying his trunk-like " telescope " two hot and 
sandy leagues to catch this morning train. 

At Esperanza the Briton went me one better on 
my own custom of " living on the country." To 
the enchiladas, large tortillas red with pepper-sauce 
and generously filled with onions, and the smaller 
tortillas covered with scraps of meat and boiled egg 
which we bought of the old women and boys that 
flocked about the train, he added a liter of pulque. 
Not far beyond, we reached Boca del Monte, the 
edge of the great plateau of Mexico. A wealth of 
scenery opened out. From the window was a truly 
bird's-eye view of the scattered town of Maltrata, 
more than two thousand feet almost directly below 
in the center of a rich green valley, about the edge 
of which, often on the very brink of the thick-clothed 
precipice, the train wound round and round behind 
the double-headed engine, traveling to every point 
of the compass in its descent. The town rose up 



Zm TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

to us at last and for the first time since mounting 
to San Luis Potosi two months before, I found my- 
self less than a mile above sea-level. Instead of 
the often bare, wind-swept plateau, immense weeds 
of the banana family grew up about us, and a beau- 
tiful winding vale reeking with damp vegetation 
stretched before and behind us as we slid onward. 
High above all else and much farther away than it 
seemed, stood the majestic, snow-white peak of 
Orizaba. In mid-afternoon we descended at the city 
of that name. 

It was large, but really a village in every fea- 
ture of life. Here again were the broad eaves of 
one-story, tile-roofed houses, stretching well out over 
the badly cobbled streets, down the center of which 
ran open sewers. The place was unkempt and un- 
clean, with many evidences of poverty, and the air 
so heavy and humid that vegetation grew even on 
the roofs. I wandered about town with the " pro- 
fessor " while he " sized it up " as a possible scene 
of his future labors, but he did not find it promising. 
By night Orizaba was still well above the tropics and 
the single blanket on the hotel cot proved far from 
sufficient even with its brilliant red hue. 



c 




CHAPTER VII 

TROPICAL MEXICO 

IT is merely a long jump with a drop of two thou- 
sand feet from Orizaba to Cordoba. But the 
train takes eighteen miles of winding, squirming, and 
tunneling to get there. On the way is some of the 
finest scenery in Mexico. The route circles for miles 
the yawning edge of a valleys dense with vegetation, 
banana and orange trees without number, with huts 
of leaves and stalks tucked away among them, myr- 
iads of flowers of every shade and color, and here 
and there coffee bushes festooned with their red ber- 
ries. The dew falls so heavily in this region that the 
rank growth was visibly dripping with it. 

At somnolent Cordoba I left the line to Vera Cruz 
for that to the southward. The car was packed 
with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children 
and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent 
against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving 
Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming 
precipitously down out of Mexico. But there were 
still descents to be found, and the train raced swiftly 

without effort in and out through ever denser jungle, 

225 



226 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

magnificent in colors, alive with birds, a land in each 
square yard of which the traveler feels a longing to 
pause and dwell for a while, to swing languidly under 
the trees, gazing at the snow peak of Orizaba now 
growing farther and farther away. 

Our conveyance was a species of way-freight, 
which whiled away most of the day at a speed fit- 
tingly respectful to the scenery about us. With 
every station the population grew perceptibly more 
lazy. The alert, eager attitude of the plateau gave 
place to a languorous lethargy evident in both faces 
and movements. People seemed less sulky than those 
higher up, more communicative and approachable, 
but also, strangely enough, less courteous, apparently 
from laziness, a lack of the energy necessary for liv- 
ing up to the rules of that Mexican virtue. They 
answered readily enough, but abruptly and indiffer- 
ently, and fell quickly into their customary som- 
nolence. For a time we skirted the Rio Blanco, boil- 
ing away toward the sea. Oranges were so plenti- 
ful they hung rotting on the trees. The jungle was 
dense, though by no means so much so as those of the 
Far East. On either hand were hundreds of native 
shacks — mongrel little huts of earth floors, trans- 
parent walls of a sort of corn-stalk, and a thick, 
top-heavy roof of jungle grass or banana leaves, set 
carelessly in bits of space chopped out of the ram- 
pant jungle. Now and then we passed gangs of men 



TROPICAL MEXICO 227 

fighting back the vegetation that threatened to swal- 
low up the track completely. 

Beautiful palm-trees began to abound, perfectly 
round, slender stems supporting hundreds of immense 
leaves hanging edgewise in perfect arch shape, per- 
haps the most symmetrical of all nature's works. 
What is there about the palm-tree so romantic and 
pleasing to the spirits? Its whisper of perpetual 
summer, of perennial life, perhaps. Great luscious 
pineapples sold through the windows at two or three 
cents each. The peons of this region carried a 
machete in a leather scabbard, but still wore a folded 
blanket over one shoulder, suggesting chilly nights. 
The general apathy of the population began to mani- 
fest itself now in the paucity of hawkers at the sta- 
tions. On the plateau the train seldom halted with- 
out being surrounded by a jostling crowd, fighting 
to sell their meager wares ; here they either lolled in 
the shade of their banana groves, waiting for pur- 
chasers to come and inspect their displays of fruit, 
or they did not even trouble to offer anything for 
sale. Why should man work when his food drops 
year by year into his lap without even replanting? 
Moreover, flat noses and kinky hair were growing 
more and more in evidence. 

Not all was jungle. As the mountains died down 
and faded away in the west there opened out many 
broad meadows in which were countless sleek cattle 



228 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

tended by somnolent herdsmen on horseback. Much 
sugar-cane grew, lengths of which were sold to the 
brawling soldiers' wives and the carload in general, 
which was soon reeking with the juice and chewed 
pulp. By afternoon jungle was a rarity and most 
of the country was a rich sort of prairie with cattle 
without number, and here and there an immense tree 
to break the monotony. These rich bottomlands 
that seemed capable of producing anything in un- 
limited quantities were almost entirely uncultivated. 
At several stations there bulked above the throng 
white men in appearance like a cross between farmers 
and missionaries, the older ones heavily bearded. 
For a time I could not catalogue them. Then, as 
we pulled out of one town, two of what but for their 
color and size I should have taken for peons raced 
for the last car-step, one shouting to the other in the 
strongest of Hoosier accents : 

" Come on, Bud, let 's jemp 'er ! " 

Which both did, riding some sixty feet, and dropped 
off like men who had at last had their one daily ex- 
citement. Inquiry proved that they belonged to a 
colony of Mormons that has settled in several groups 
in this region, where nature sets their creed a pro- 
lific example. 

Unbroken prairies, in their tropical form, now 
stretched as far as the eye could reach, with just the 
shade of a shadowy range in the far west. The heat 
had not once grown oppressive during the day. 



TROPICAL MEXICO 229 

With dusk it turned almost cold. We wound slowly 
on into the damp, heavy night, a faint full moon 
struggling to tear itself a peep-hole through the 
clouds, and finally at ten, seat-sore with fifteen hours 
of slat-bench riding, pulled up at Santa Lucrecia. 

It was just such a town as dozens of others we had 
passed that day ; a plain station building surrounded 
unevenly by a score or so of banana-grove huts. 
Here ends the railroad southward, joining that across 
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Fronrthe track of the 
latter a wooden sidewalk that ran,g drum-hollow un- 
der my heels led across a gully of unknown depth in 
the black night to the Hotel "El Sol Mejicano," 
standing-room for which had been gashed out of the 
jungle. It was a wooden and sheet-iron building on 
stilts, swarming even at night with dirty children, 
pigs, chickens, and yellow dogs, and presided over by 
a glassy-eyed, slatternly woman of French anteced- 
ents, the general shape of a wine-skin three-fourths 
full, and of a ghoulish instinct toward the purses of 
travelers. In one end were a dozen " rooms," sep- 
arated by partitions reaching half way to the sheet- 
iron roof, and in the other a single combination of 
grocery and general store, saloon and pool-table, as- 
sorted filth and the other attributes of outposts of 
civilization. The chambers were not for rent, but 
only the privilege of occupying one of the several beds 
in each. These fortunately were fairly clean, with 
good springs and mosquito canopies, but with only a 



230 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

quilt for mattress — unless it was meant for cover — 
a single sheet, and the usual two little, round, hard 
mountainous pillows. Otherwise the cabins were 
wholly unfurnished, even to windows. The train 
that had brought us in spent the night bucking and 
j olting back and forth near by ; even a barefoot serv- 
ant walking anywhere in the building or on the ver- 
anda set the edifice rocking as in an earthquake ; two 
Mexicans occupying the " room " next to my own — 
more properly, the one I helped occupy — bawled 
anecdotes and worse at the top of their voices most 
of the night ; guests were hawking and spitting and 
coughing incessantly in various parts of the house ; 
at three a servant began beating on the door with 
something in the nature of a sledge-hammer to know 
if I wished to take the train Atlantic-bound, and re- 
fused to accept a negative answer; my room-mate 
held the world's record for snoring; at the first sug- 
gestion of dawn every child, chicken, and assorted 
animal in the building and vicinity set up its greatest 
possible uproar ; and I was half-frozen all night, even 
under all the clothing I possessed. Except for these 
few annoyances, I slept splendidly. There was at 
least the satisfaction of knowing that a traveling mil- 
lionaire obliged to pass a night in Santa Lucrecia 
would spend it no better. 

Everything was dripping wet when I fled back 
across the aerial sidewalk to the station. It was not 
hot, but there was a dense, heavy atmosphere in which 



TROPICAL MEXICO 231 

one felt he could be as lively and industrious as else- 
where, yet found himself dragging listlessly around 
as the never-do-anything-you-don't-have-to inhabi- 
tants. Even the boyish train auditor had an ir- 
responsible lackadaisical manner, and permitted all 
sorts of petty railway misdemeanors. The child- 
ishness of tropical peoples was evident on every hand. 
There was no second-class car on this line, but one 
third, all but empty when we started, evidently not 
because most bought first-class tickets but because 
the auditor was of the tropics. Endless jungle cov- 
ered all the visible world, with only the line of rails 
crowding through it. The cocoanut palms and those 
top-heavy with what looked like enormous bunches 
of dates soon died out as we left the vicinity of the 
coast. At Rincon Antonio the car filled up, and 
among the new-comers were many of the far-famed 
women of Tehuantepec. Some were of striking 
beauty, almost all were splendid physical specimens 
and all had a charming and alluring smile. They 
dressed very briefly — a gay square of cloth about 
their limbs, carelessly tucked in at the waist, and a 
sleeveless upper garment that failed to make con- 
nections with the lower, recalling the women of Cey- 
lon. The absence of any other garments was all too 
evident. Almost all wore in their jet-black hair a 
few red flowers, all displayed six inches or more of 
silky brown skin at the waist, and the majority wore 
necklaces of gold coins, generally American five and 



TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

ten dollar gold pieces. To see one of them stretched 
out at full length on a seat, smoking a cigarette and 
in animated conversation with a man that five minutes 
before had been a total stranger, might have sug- 
gested a certain looseness of character. But this 
was denied by their facial expression, which bore out 
the claim of a chance acquaintance long resident 
among them that they are very frank, " simple," and 
friendly, but far more apt to keep within a well- 
defined limit than the average of tropical women. 
Tehuantepec, indeed, is the land of " woman's rights." 
The men having been largely killed off during the 
days of Diaz, the feminine stock is to-day the stur- 
dier, more intelligent, and industrious, and arrogates 
to itself a far greater freedom than the average Mex- 
ican woman. Many of those in the car spoke the 
local Indian dialect, Zapoteca, but all seemed pos- 
sessed of fluent Spanish. 

Yet how different was all the carload from what 
we have come to consider " civilized " people. If the 
aim of humanity is to be happy in the present, then 
these languid, brown races are on the right track. 
If that aim is to advance, develop, and accomplish, 
they must be classed with the lower animals. 

For a half hour before reaching Rincon Antonio, 
we had been winding with a little brawling river 
through a hilly gorge dense-grown with vegetation. 
The town was in the lull between two revolts. A bare 
four days before, a former chief and his followers 




Women of Tehuantepec in the market-place 




On the hillside above Tehuantepec are dwellings partly dug out of 

the cliffs 



TROPICAL MEXICO 235 

had been taken by the populace and shot behind the 
water-tank beside where we paused at the station. 
A week later new riots were to break out. But to- 
day the place was sunk in its customary languor, 
and only a few bullet-ridden walls and charred ruins 
hinted its recent history. 

I had pictured the Isthmus of Tehuantepec a flat 
neck of land from ocean to ocean. But the imagina- 
tion is a deceitful guide. Beyond the town of the 
water-tank we wormed for miles through mountains 
higher than the Berkshires, resembling them indeed 
in form and wealth of vegetation, though with a tropi- 
cal tinge. The jungle, however, died out, and the 
train crawled at a snail's pace, often looping back 
upon itself, through landscapes in which the organ- 
cactus was most conspicuous. Even here the great 
chain known as the Rockies and the Andes, that 
stretches from Alaska to Patagonia, imposes a con- 
siderable barrier between the two seas. There was a 
cosmopolitan tinge to this region, and the boinas of 
Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Ameri- 
cans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad 
" Texas " hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick- 
wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuante- 
pec, an intangible place that I had some difficult}' in 
definitely locating in the thickening darkness. 

Here was a new kind of Mexico. In many things, 
besides the naked, brown waists of the women, it car- 
ried the mind back to Ceylon. There were the same 



236 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

reed and thatched huts, almost all surrounded by 
spacious yards fenced by corn-stalk walls through 
which the inmates could see easily but be seen with 
difficulty. Here, too, boys went naked until the ap- 
proach of puberty; the cocoanut palms, the dense 
banana groves, even the huge earthen water-jars be- 
fore the houses recalled the charming isle of the 
Singhalese, and if the people were less kindly to the 
stranger they were much more joyful and full of 
laughter than the Mexican of the plateau. In this 
perhaps they had more in common with the Burmese. 
The men, often almost white in color, wore few large 
hats, never one approaching those of the highlands. 
The hotter the sun, the smaller the hat, seems to be 
the rule in Mexico. Here it was hot, indeed ; a dense, 
thick, tangible heat, that if it did not sap the strength 
suggested the husbanding of it. 

A fiesta raged on the night of my arrival. The 
not too musical blare of a band drew me to a wide, 
inclined street paved in sand, at the blind end of 
which were seated five rows of women in as many 
gradations, and everywhere shuttled men and boys, 
almost all in white trousers, with a shirt of the same 
color, Chinese-fashion, outside it, commonly barefoot 
with or without sandals. A few even wore shoes. 
I hesitated to join the throng. The subconscious 
expectation of getting a knife or a bullet in the back 
grows second nature in Mexico. Few foreigners but 
have contracted the habit of stepping aside to let 



TROPICAL MEXICO 237 

pass a man who hangs long at their heels. The ap- 
proach of a staggering, talkative peon was always an 
occasion for alertness, and one that came holding a 
hand behind him was an object of undivided curiosity 
until the concealed member appeared, clutching per- 
haps nothing more interesting than a cigar or a 
banana. Mexicans in crowds, mixed with liquor and 
" religion," were always worth attention ; and here 
was just such a mixture, for the fiesta was in honor 
of the Virgin, and the libations that had been poured 
out in her honor were generous. But the drink of 
Tehuantepec, whatever it might be — for pulque is 
unknown in the tropics — appeared to make its de- 
votees merely gay and boisterous. The adults were 
friendly, even to an American, and the children 
shouted greetings to me as " Senor Gringo," which 
here is merely a term of nationality and no such op- 
probrious title as it has grown to be on the plateau. 
A few rockets had suggested an incipient revolu- 
tion while I was at supper. Now the scene of the 
festivities was enlivened by four huge set-pieces of 
fireworks, each with a bell-shaped base in which a man 
could ensconce himself to the waist. One in the form 
of a duck first took to human legs and capered about 
the square while its network of rockets, pin-wheels, 
sizzlers, twisters, cannon-like explosions, and jets of 
colored fire kept the multitude surging back and forth 
some twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of maud- 
lin laughter and the dancing and screaming of chil- 



238 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

dren, while the band, frankly giving up its vain at- 
tempts to produce music, gazed with all eyes and blew 
an unattentive, never-ending rag-time of some two 
strains. A monster turkey took up the celebration 
where the charred and disheveled duck left off, caper- 
ing itself into blazing and uproarious oblivion. The 
finale consisted of two gigantic figures of a man and 
a woman, with a marvelous array of all possible lights 
and noises that lasted a full half-hour, while the two 
barefoot wearers danced back and forth bowing and 
careering to each other. The aftermath ran far into 
the night, and brought to naught my plans to make 
up for the sleepless night before. 

Though most of the inhabitants of Tehuantepec 
live on earth floors in reed and grass houses, there 
is scarcely a sign of suffering poverty. Little Span- 
ish is heard among them, although even the children 
seem quite able to speak it. Their native Indian 
tongue differs from the Castilian even in cadence, so 
that it was easy to tell which idiom was being spoken 
even before the words were heard. It is the chief 
medium of the swarming market in and about the 
black shadows of a roof on legs. Here the frank 
and self-possessed women, in their brief and simple 
dress, were legion. Footwear is unknown to them, 
and the loose, two-piece, disconnected dress was aug- 
mented, if at all, with a black lace shawl thrown over 
the shoulders in the, to them, chilly mornings. But 
the most remarkable part of the costume, of decora- 






IK 




M '" W 


o 




ti 




p 








2 




p_ 








p 4 


i. v 




j*^;* - 



TROPICAL MEXICO 241 

tive properties only, is the head-dress common to a 
large per cent, of the women in town. From the 
back of the otherwise bare head hangs to the waist 
an intricate contrivance of lace and ruffles, snow- 
white and starched stiff, the awful complications of 
which no mere male would be able to describe beyond 
the comprehensive statement that the ensemble much 
resembles a Comanche chief in full war regalia. 
Above this they carry their loads on their heads in 
a sort of gourd bowl decorated with flowers, and walk 
with a sturdy self-sufficiency that makes a veranda or 
bridge quake under their brown-footed tread. They 
are lovers of color, especially here where the Pacific 
breezes turn the jungle to the eastward into a gaunt, 
sandy, brown landscape, and such combinations as 
soft-red skirts and sea-blue waists, or the reverse, 
mingle with black shot through with long perpendicu- 
lar yellow stripes. The striking beauties of many a 
traveler's hectic imagination were not in evidence. 
But then, it is nowhere customary to find a town's 
best selling sapotes and fish in the market-place, and 
at least the attractiveness ranked high compared 
with a similar scene in any part of the world, while 
cleanliness was far more popular than in the high- 
lands to the north. 

The foreigner in Mexico is often surprised at the 
almost impossibility of getting the entree into its 
family life. American residents of high position are 
often intimate friends for years of Mexican men in 



242 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

their cafes and male gatherings, without ever step- 
ping across their thresholds. Much of the seclusion 
of the Moor still holds, even half a world distant 
from the land of its origin. Yet his racial pseudo- 
courtesy leads the Mexican frequently to extend an 
invitation which only long experience teaches the 
stranger is a mere meaningless formality. On the 
train from Cordoba I spent considerable time in con- 
versation with a well-to-do youth of Tehuantepec, 
during which I was formally invited at least a dozen 
times to visit him at his home. He failed to meet me 
at the rendezvous set, but was effusive when I ran 
across him in the evening round of the plaza : 

" Ah, amigo mio. Muy buenas noches. Como 
'sta* uste-e-e? So delighted! I was grieved beyond 
measure to miss you. I live in the Calle Reforma, 
number 83. There you have your own house. I am 
going there now. Do you not wish to accompany 
me? I have . . ." 

" Yes, I should like to look in on you for a few 
moments." 

" Ah, I was so sorry to miss you," he went on, 
standing stock still. " I must give you my address 
and you must write me, and I you." 

There followed an exchange of cards with great 
formality and many protestations of eternal friend- 
ship ; then an effusive hand-shake and : 

" Mil gracias, seiior. May you have a most pleas- 
ant voyage. Thanks again. So pleased to have met 



TROPICAL MEXICO 243 

you. Adios. May you travel well. Hasta luego. 
Adios. Que le vaya bien," and with a flip of the 
hand and a wriggling of the fingers he was gone. 

That evening I returned early to the " Hotel La 
Perla." Its entire force was waiting for me. This 
consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue 
undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain 
age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, 
sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but 
name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical 
native on the down-grade of life who never moved 
twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving 
the establishment to run itself, and accepting phleg- 
matically what money it pleased Providence to send 
him. The force was delighted at the pleasure of hav- 
ing a guest to wait upon, and stood opposite me all 
through the meal, offering gems of assorted wisdom 
intermingled with wide-ranging questions. I called 
for an extra blanket and turned in soon after dark. 
There reigned a delicious stillness that promised 
ample reparation for the two nights past. Barely 
had I drowsed off, however, when there intruded the 
chattering of several men in the alleyway and yard 
directly outside my window. " They '11 soon be 
gone," I told myself, turning over. But I was over- 
optimistic. The voices increased, those of women 
chiming in. Louder and louder grew the uproar. 
Then a banjo-like instrument struck up, accompany- 
ing the most dismally mournful male voice conceiv- 



244 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

able, wailing a monotonous refrain of two short lines. 
This increased in volume until it might be heard a 
mile away. Male and female choruses joined in now 
and then. In the snatches between, the monotonous 
voice wailed on, mingled with laughter and frequent 
disputes. I rose at last to peer out the window. 
In the yard were perhaps a half-hundred natives, all 
seated on the ground, some with their backs against 
the very wall of my room, nearly all smoking, and 
with many pots of liquor passing from hand to hand. 
Midnight struck, then one, then two ; and with every 
hour the riot increased. Once or twice I drifted into 
a short troubled dream, to be aroused with a start 
by a new burst of pandemonium. Then gradually 
the sounds subsided almost entirely. My watch 
showed three o'clock. I turned over again, grateful 
for the few hours left . . . and in that instant, with- 
out a breath of warning, there burst out the supreme 
cataclysm of a band of some twenty hoarse and bat- 
tered pieces in an endless, unfathomable noise, that 
never once paused for breath until daylight stole in 
at the window. 

At " breakfast " I took Juan to task. 

" Ah, senor," he smiled, " it is too bad. But yes- 
terday a man died in the house next door, and his 
friends have come to celebrate." 

" And keep the whole town awake all night ? " 

" Ay, senor, it is unfortunate indeed. But what 
would you ? People will die, you know." 








I 



A station of the "Pan-American" south of Tehuantepec 




An Indian boy of Guatemala on his way home from market 



TROPICAL MEXICO 247 

Sleep is plainly not indigenous to the Isthmus of 
Tehuantepec. 

From the neighboring town of Gamboa there runs 
southward a railway known as the " Pan-American." 
Its fares are high and a freight-train behind an 
ancient, top-heavy engine drags a single passenger- 
car divided into two classes with it on its daily jour- 
ney. The ticket-agent had no change, and did not 
know whether the end of the line was anywhere near 
Guatemala, though he was full of stories of the dan- 
gers to travelers in that country. A languid, good- 
natured crowd filled the car. We are so accustomed 
to think of lack of clothing as an attribute of savages 
that it was little short of startling to see a young 
lady opposite, naked to the waist but for a scanty 
and transparent suggestion of upper garment, read 
the morning newspaper and write a note with the 
savoir-faire of a Parisienne in her boudoir. She wore 
a necklace of American five-dollar gold pieces, with a 
pendant of twenties, the Goddess of Liberty and the 
date, 1898, on the visible side, and as earrings two 
older coins of $2.50. Nearly every woman in the car 
was thus decorated to some extent, always with the 
medallion side most in evidence, and one could see at 
a glance exactly how much each was worth. 

In a long day's travel we covered 112 miles. At 
Juchitan the passengers thinned. Much of this 
town had recently been destroyed in the revolution, 
and close to the track stood a crowded cemetery 



248 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

with hundreds of gorged and somnolent zopilotes, 
the carrion-crow of Mexico, about it. The country 
was a blazing dry stretch of mesquite and rare 
patches of forest in a sandy soil, with huts so few that 
the train halted at each of them, as if to catch its 
breath and wipe the sweat out of its eyes. Once, 
toward noon, we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. 
But all the day there spread on either hand an arid 
region with bare rocky hills, a fine sand that drifted 
in the air, and little vegetation except the thorny 
mesquite. A few herds of cattle were seen, but they 
were as rare as the small towns of stone huts and 
frontiers-man aspect. The train passed the after- 
noon like a walker who knows he can easily reach his 
night's destination, and strolled leisurely into To- 
nola before sunset. 

Beyond the wild-west hotel lay a sweltering sand 
town of a few streets atrociously cobbled. We had 
reached the land of hammocks. Not a hut did I 
peep into that did not have three or four swinging 
lazily above the uneven earth floor. In the center 
of the broad, unkempt expanse that served as plaza 
stood an enormous pochote, a species of cottonwood 
tree, and about it drowsed a Sunday evening gather- 
ing half seen in the dim light of lanterns on the stands 
of hawkers. On a dark corner three men and a boy 
were playing a marimba, a frame with dried bars of 
wood as keys which, beaten with small wooden mal- 
lets, gave off a weird, half-mournful music that 



TROPICAL MEXICO 249 

floated slowly away into the heavy hot night. The 
women seemed physically the equal of those of Te- 
huantepec, but their dress was quite different, a 
single loose white gown cut very low at the neck and 
almost without sleeves. One with a white towel on 
her head and hanging loosely about her shoulders 
looked startlingly like an Egyptian female figure that 
had stepped forth from the monuments of the Nile. 
Their brown skins were lustrous as silk, every line 
of their lithe bodies of a Venus-like development and 
they stood erect as palm-trees, or slipped by in the 
sand-paved night under their four-gallon American 
oilcans of water with a silent, sylph-like tread. 

The train, like an experienced tropical traveler, 
started at the first peep of dawn. Tonola marked 
the beginning of a new style of landscape, heralding 
the woodlands of Guatemala. All was now dense and 
richly green, not exactly jungle, but with forests of 
huge trees, draped with climbing vines, interlarded 
with vistas of fat cattle by the hundreds up to their 
bellies in heavy green grass, herds of which now and 
then brought us almost to a standstill by stampeding 
across the track. In contrast to the day before 
there were many villages, a kind of cross between the 
jungle towns of Siam and the sandy hamlets of our 
" Wild West." A number had sawmills for the ma- 
hogany said to abound in the region. Now and then 
a pretty lake alive with wild fowl appeared in a frame 
of green. There were many Negroes, and not a few 



250 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

Americans among the ranchers, sawmill hands and 
railway employees, while John Chinaman, forbidden 
entrance to the country to the south, as to that north 
of the Rio Grande, put in a frequent appearance, as 
in all Mexico. It was a languorous, easy-going 
land, where day-before-yesterday's paper was news. 
The sulky stare of the Mexican plateau had com- 
pletely disappeared, and in its place was much 
laughter and an unobtrusive friendliness, and a com- 
plete lack of obsequiousness even on the part of the 
peons, who elbowed their way in and out among all 
classes as if there were no question as to the equality 
of all mankind. The daily arrival of the train 
seemed to be the chief recreation of the populace, so 
that there were signs of protest if it made only a 
brief stop. But there was seldom cause for this 
complaint, for the swollen-headed old engine was still 
capable of so much more than the schedule required 
that it was forced to make a prolonged stay at almost 
every station to let Father Time catch up with us. 

The rumor ran that those who would enter Guate- 
mala must get permission of its consul in Tapachula. 
But our own representative at that town chanced to 
board the train at a wayside hamlet and found the 
papers I carried sufficient. Two fellow countrymen 
raced away into the place as the train drew in, and 
returned drenched with sweat in time to continue with 
our leisurely convoy. Dakin was a boyish man from 
the Northern States, and Ems a swarthy " Texican " 



TROPICAL MEXICO 251 

to whom Span sli was more native than English, both 
wandering southward in quest of jobs, as stationary 
and locomotive engineers respectively. They rode 
first-class, though this did not imply wealth, but 
merely that Pat Cassidy was conductor. He was a 
burly, whole-hearted American, supporting an enor- 
mous, flaring mustache and, by his own admission, 
all the " busted " white men traveling between Mexico 
and Guatemala. While I kept the seat to which my 
ticket entitled me, he passed me with a look of curi- 
osity not unmixed with a hint of scorn. When I 
stepped into the upholstered class to ask him a ques- 
tion he bellowed, " Si' down ! " The inquiry an- 
swered, I rose to leave, only to be brought down again 
with a shout of, " Keep yer seat ! " It is no fault of 
Cassidy's if a " gringo " covers the Pan-American on 
foot or seated with peons, or goes hungry and thirsty 
or tobaccoless on the journey; and penniless stran- 
gers are not conspicuous by their absence along this 
route. As a Virginia Negro at one of the stations 
put it succinctly, " If dey ain't black, dey 'se white." 
A jungle bewilderment of vegetation grew up about 
us, with rich clearings for little clusters of palm- 
leaf huts, jungles so dense the eye could not penetrate 
them. Laughing women, often of strikingly attrac- 
tive features, peopled every station, perfect in form 
as a Greek statue, and with complexions of burnished 
bronze. Everywhere was evidence of a constant 
joy in life and of a placid conviction that Providence 



252 TRAMPING THROUGH MEXICO 

or some other philanthopist who had always taken 
care of them always would. Teeth were not so uni- 
versally splendid as on the plateau, but the luminous, 
snapping black eyes more than made up for this less 
perfect feature. 

Nightfall found us still rumbling lazily on and it 
was nearly an hour later that we reached Mariscal 
at the end of the line, four or five scattered buildings 
of which two disguised themselves under the name of 
hotels. Ems and I slept — or more exactly passed 
the night — on cots in one of the rooms of trans- 
parent partitions, while Dakin, who refused to accept 
alms for anything so useless, spread a grass mat 
among the dozen native women stretched out along 
the veranda. 



CHAPTER VIII y 

HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

THE three of us were off by the time the day 
had definitely dawned. Ems carried a heavy 
suitcase, and Dakin an awkward bundle. My own 
modest belongings rode more easily in a rucksack. 
A mile walk along an unused railroad, calf-high in 
jungle grass, brought us to a wooden bridge across 
the wide but shallow Suchiate, bounding Mexico on 
the south. Across its plank floor and beyond ran the 
rails of the " Pan-American," but the trains halt at 
Mariscal because Guatemala, or more exactly Es- 
trada Cabrera, does not permit them to enter his 
great and sovereign republic. Our own passage 
looked easy, but that was because of our inexperience 
of Central American ways. Scarcely had we set foot 
on the bridge when there came racing out of a palm- 
leaf hut on the opposite shore three male ragamuffins 
in bare feet, shouting as they ran. One carried an 
antedeluvian, muzzle-loading musket, another an 
ancient bayonet red with rust, and the third swung 
threateningly what I took to be a stiff piece of tele- 
graph wire. 

" No se pasa ! " screamed the three in chorus, 
253 



254 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

spreading out in skirmish line like an army ready to 
oppose to the death the invasion of a hostile force. 
" No one can pass the bridge ! " 

" But why not? " I asked. 

" Because Guatemala does not allow it." 

" Do you mean to say three caballeros with money 
and passports — and shoes are denied admittance to 
the great and famous Republic of Guatemala? " 

" Not at all, senor, but you must come by boat. 
The Pope himself cannot cross this bridge." 

It would have been unkind to throw them into the 
river, so we returned to a cluster of huts on the Mexi- 
can bank. Before it drowsed a half-dozen ancient 
and leaky boats. But here again were grave inter- 
national formalities to be arranged. A Mexican offi- 
cial led us into one of the huts and set down labor- 
iously in a ledger our names, professions, bachelor- 
doms, and a mass of even more personal information. 

" You are Catholic, senor," he queried with poised 
pen, eying me suspiciously. 

" No, sefior." 

" Ah, Protestant," he observed, starting to set 
down that conclusion. 

" Tampoco." 

There came a hitch in proceedings. Plainly there 
was no precedent to follow in considering the applica- 
tion of so non-existent a being for permission to leave 
Mexico. The official smoked a cigarette pensively 
and idly turned over the leaves of the ledger. 




Three "gringoes" on the tramp from the Mexican boundary to the 
railway of Guatemala 




Inside the race-track at Guatemala City is a relief map of the entire 

country 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 257 

" Sera ateo," said a man behind him, swelling his 
chest with pride at his extraordinary intelligence. 

" That does n't fill the bill either," I replied, " nor 
any other single word I can think of." 

But the space for this particular item of informa- 
tion was cramped. We finally compromised on " Sin 
religion," and I was allowed to leave the country. 
A boatman tugged and poled some twenty minutes 
before we could scramble up the steep, jungle-grown 
bank beyond. At the top of it were scattered a dozen 
childish looking soldiers in the most unkempt and di- 
sheveled array of rags and lack thereof a cartoonist 
could picture. They formed in a hollow square 
about us and steered us toward the " comandancia," 
a few yards beyond. This was a thatched mud hut 
with a lame bench and a row of aged muskets in the 
shade along its wall. Another bundle of rags 
emerged in his most pompous, authoritative de- 
meanor, and ordered us to open our baggage. 
Merely by accident I turned my rucksack face down 
on the bench, so there is no means of knowing whether 
the kodak and weapon in the front pockets of it 
would have been confiscated or held for ransom, had 
they been seen. I should be inclined to answer in the 
affirmative. In the hut our passports were carefully 
if unintelligently examined, and we were again fully 
catalogued. Estrada Cabrera follows with great 
precision the movements of foreigners within his 
boundaries. 



258 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

In the sandy jungle town of Ayutla just beyond, 
two of us multiplied our wealth many times over with- 
out the least exertion. That Dakin did not also 
was only due to the unavoidable fact that he had no 
multiplicand to set over the multiplier. I threw 
down Mexican money to the value of $8.30 and had 
thrust upon me a massive roll of $150. The only 
drawback was that the bills had led so long and mal- 
treated a life that their face value had to be accepted 
chiefly on faith, for a ten differed from a one only as 
one Guatemalan soldier differs from his fellows, in 
that each was much more tattered and torn than the 
other. After all there is a delicate courtesy in a 
government's supplying an illiterate population with 
illegible money; no doubt experience knows other 
distinguishing marks, such as the particular breeds 
of microbes that is accustomed to inhabit each de- 
nomination ; for even inexperience could easily recog- 
nize that each was so infested. I mistake in saying 
this was the only drawback. There was another. 
The wanderer who drops into a hut for a banana and 
a bone-dry biscuit, washed down with a small bottle 
of luke-warm fizzling water, hears with a pang akin to 
heart-failure a languid murmur of " Four dollars, 
sefior," in answer to his request for the bill. It is not 
easy to get accustomed to hearing such sums men- 
tioned in so casual a manner. 

A little narrow-gage " railway " crawls off through 
the jungle beyond Ayutla, but the train ran on it 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 259 

yesterday and to-morrow. To-day there was noth- 
ing to do but swing on our loads and strike off south- 
ward. The morning air was fresh and the eastern 
jungle wall threw heavy shade for a time. But that 
time soon came to an end and I plodded on under a 
sun that multiplied the load on my back by at least 
the monetary multiple of Guatemala. Ems and 
Dakin quickly demonstrated a deep dislike to tropical 
tramping, though both laid claim to the degree of 
T. T. T. conferred on " gringo " rovers in Central 
America. I waited for them several times in vain and 
finally pushed on to the sweltering, heat-pulsating 
town of Pahapeeta, where every hut sold bottled fire- 
water and a diminutive box of matches cost a dollar. 
Grass huts tucked away in dense groves along the 
route were inhabited by all but naked brown people, 
kindly disposed, so it required no exertion, to a pass- 
ing stranger. Before noon the jungle opened out 
upon an ankle-deep sea of sand, across which I plowed 
under a blazing sun that set even the bundle on my 
back dripping with sweat. 

But at least there was a broad river on the farther 
side of it that looked inviting enough to reward a 
whole day of tramping. The place was called Vado 
Ancho — the " Wide Wade " ; though that was no 
longer necessary, for the toy railroad that operated 
to-morrow and yesterday had brought a bridge with 
it. I scrambled my way along the dense-grown 
farther bank, and found a place to descend to a big 



260 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

shady rock just fitted for a siesta after a swim. 
Barely had I begun to undress, however, when three 
brown and barefoot grown-up male children, partly 
concealed in astounding collections of rags, two with 
ancient muskets and the third with a stiff piece of 
wire, tore through the bushes and surrounded me 
with menacing attitudes. 

"What are you doing here? " cried the least naked. 

" Why the idle curiosity? " 

" You are ordered to come to the comandancia." 

I scrambled back up the bank and plodded across 
another sand patch toward a small collection of 
jungle huts, the three " soldiers " crowding close 
about me and wearing the air of brave heroes who had 
saved their country from a great conspiracy. Lazy 
natives lay grinning in the shade as I passed. One 
of the lop-shouldered, thatched huts stood on a hil- 
lock above the rest. When we had sweated up to 
this, a military order rang out in a cracked treble and 
some twenty brown scarecrows lined up in the shade 
of the eaves in a Guatemalan idea of order. About 
half of them held what had once been muskets ; the 
others were armed with what I had hitherto taken for 
lengths of pilfered telegraph wire, but which now on 
closer inspection proved to be ramrods. Thus each 
arm made only two armed men, whereas a bit of in- 
genuity might have made each serve three or four ; 
by dividing the stocks and barrels, for instance. 
The tatterdemalion of the treble fiercely demanded 




One of the jungle-hidden ruins of Quiragud 




^HgRBgg 






The last house in Guatemala, near the boundary of Honduras 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 263 

my passport, while the " army " quickly degenerated 
into a ragged rabble loafing in the shade. 

I started to lay my rucksack on the bench along 
the wall, but one of the fellows sprang up with a snarl 
and flourished his ramrod threateningly. It was evi- 
dently a Use militarismus worthy of capital punish- 
ment for a civilian to pass between a pole supporting 
the eaves and the mud wall of the building. I was 
forced to stand in the blazing sunshine and claw out 
my papers. They were in English, but the carica- 
ture of an officer concealed his ignorance before his 
fellows by pretending to read them and at length 
gave me a surly permission to withdraw. No wonder 
Central America is a favorite locale for comic opera 
librettos. 

I descended again to the river for a swim, but had 
not yet stretched out for a siesta when there came 
pushing through the undergrowth three more " sol- 
diers," this time all armed with muskets. 

" What 's up now ? " 

" The colonel wants to see you in the comandan- 
cia." 

" But I just saw your famous colonel." 

" No, that was only the teniente." 

When I reached the hilltop again, dripping with 
the heat of noonday, I was permitted to sit on an 
adobe brick in the sacred shade. T'ie colonel was 
sleeping. He recovered from that tropical ailment 
in time, and a rumor came floating out that he was 



264 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

soon to honor us with his distinguished presence. 
The soldiers made frantic signs to me to rise to my 
feet. Like Kingslake before the Turkish pasha, I 
felt that the honor of my race and my own haughty 
dignity were better served by insisting on social 
equality even to a colonel, and stuck doggedly to the 
adobe brick. The rumor proved a false alarm any- 
way. No doubt the great man had turned over in his 
sleep. 

By and by the lieutenant came to say the com- 
mander was in his office, and led the way there. At 
the second door of the mud-and-straw building he 
paused to add in an awe-struck whisper : 

" Take off your hat and wait until he calls you in." 

Instead I stepped toward the entrance, but the 
teniente snatched at the slack of my shirt with a 
gasp of terror: 

" Por Dios ! Take off your revolver ! If the 
colonel sees it . . ." 

I shook him off and, marching in with martial 
stride and a haughty carelessness of attitude, sat 
down in the only chair in the room except that occu- 
pied by the commander, with a hearty : 

" Buenas tardes, colonel." 

He was a typical guatemalteco in whole trousers 
and an open shirt, but of some education, for he was 
writing with moderate rapidity at his homemade desk. 
He also wore shoes. His manner was far more rea- 
sonable than that of his illiterate underlings, and we 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 265 

were soon conversing rationally. He appeared to 
know enough English to get the gist of my passport, 
but handed it back with the information that I 
should have official Guatemalan permission to exist 
within the confines of his eighteen-for-a-dollar coun- 
try. 

" You carry an apparatus for the making of 
photographs," he went on. " Suppose you had taken 
a picture of our fortress and garrison here? " 

"Gar— How's that, Senor?" 

" It is the law of all countries, as you know, not 
to allow the photographing of places of military im- 
portance. Even the English would arrest you if 
you took a picture of Gibraltar." 

It was careless of me not to have noted the striking 
similarity of this stronghold to that at the entrance 
to the Mediterranean. Both stand on hills. 

" And where do I get this official permission ? " 

" Impossible." 

" Yet necessary? " 

But I still carried Mexican cigarettes, a luxury in 
Guatemala, so we parted friends, with the manners 
of a special envoy taking leave of a prime minister. 
The only requirement was that I should not open my 
kodak within sight of this hotbed of military im- 
portance. I all but made the fatal error of passing 
between the sacred eave-post and the wall upon my 
exit, but sidestepped in time to escape unscathed, 
and left the great fortress behind and above me. 



266 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

After all I had been far more fortunate than a fel- 
low countryman I met later, who had had a $200 
camera smashed by this same ragged " garrison." 

Siesta time was past and I struck on out of town. 
In the last hut an old woman called out to know why 
I had gone down to the river, and showed some sus- 
picion at my answer. 

" There are so many countries trying to get our 
war plans," she explained. 

A trail wide enough for single-wheeled vehicles 
crowded its way between jungle walls. In the breath- 
less, blazing sunshine the sweat passed through my 
rucksack and into my formal city garments beyond, 
carrying the color of the sack with it. For some 
time no one was abroad except a dripping " gringo " 
and a rare cargador in barely the rags necessary to 
escape complete nakedness, who greeted me subservi- 
ently and gave me most of the road. The Indians of 
the region were inferior in physique to those of the 
Mexican plateau, ragged beyond words, and far from 
handsome in appearance. Their little thatched huts 
swarmed, however, and almost all displayed some- 
thing to sell, chiefly strong native liquor in bottles 
that had seen long and varied service. There was 
nothing to eat but oranges green in color. The way 
was often strewn with hundreds of huge orange- 
colored ones, but they were more sour than lemons 
and often bitter. A tropical downpour drove me 
once into the not too effective shelter of the jungle, 




A woman shelling corn for my first meal in Honduras 




A vista of Honduras from a hillside, to which I climbed after losing 

the trail 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 269 

and with sunset a drizzle set in with a promise of in- 
crease. A woodchopper had told me I could not 
reach my proposed destination that night, but I 
pressed forward at my best pace up hill and down 
through an all but continuous vegetation and sur- 
prised myself by stumbling soon after dark upon 
electric-lighted Coatepeque, the first real town of 
Guatemala, and not a very real one at that. 

However, a burly American ran a hotel where the 
bill for supper and lodging was only $15, and if the 
partitions of my room were bare they were of ma- 
hogany, as were also the springs of the bed. The 
pilfering of an extra mattress softened this misfor- 
tune somewhat, and toward morning it grew cool 
enough to stop sweating. When I descended in the 
morning, Ems and Dakin were sitting over their cof- 
fee and eggs. They had paid $5 each to ride in a 
covered bullock cart from Vado Ancho — and be 
churned to a pulp. 

Reunited, we pushed on in the morning shadows. 
Ems and Dakin divided the weight of the former's 
suitcase ; but even after the " Texican " had thrown 
away two heavy books on locomotive driving, both 
groaned under their loads. The sun of Guatemala 
does not lighten the burdens of the trail. Ems had 
boarded the bullock cart the proud possessor of a 
bar of soap, but this morning he found it a powder 
and sprinkled it along the way. Soap is out of keep- 
ing with Guatemalan local color anyway. Dense 



270 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

forests continued, but here almost all had an under- 
growth of coffee bushes. Some of the largest coffee 
fincas of Guatemala lie along this road, producing 
annually to hundreds of thousands in gold. Such 
prosperity was not reflected in the population and 
toilers. The natives were ragged, but friendly, every 
man carrying a machete, generally in a leather scab- 
bard, and the women almost without exception enor- 
mous loads of fruit. They were weak, unintelligent, 
pimple-faced mortals, speaking an Indian dialect and 
using Spanish only with difficulty. Ragged Indian 
girls were picking coffee here and there, even more 
tattered carriers lugged it in sacks and baskets to 
large, cement-floored spaces near the estate houses, 
where men shoveled the red berries over and over 
in the sun and old women hulled them in the shade of 
their huts. 

Jungle trees, often immense and polished smooth 
as if they had been flayed of their bark, gave us 
dense cool shade, scented by countless wild flowers. 
But en cambio the soft dirt road climbed and wound 
and descended all but incessantly, gradually work- 
ing its way higher, until we could look out now and 
then over hundreds of square miles of hot country 
with barely a break in all its expanse of dense, steam- 
ing vegetation. Coffee continued, but alternated 
now with the slender trees of rubber plantations, with 
their long smooth leaves, and already scarred like 
young warriors long inured to battle. The road was 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 271 

really only an enlarged trail, not laid out, but follow- 
ing the route of the first Indian who picked his way 
over these jungled hills. Huts were seldom lacking; 
poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the after- 
noon the trail pitched headlong down and around 
through a rock-spilled barranco with two sheer walls 
of the densest jungle and forest shutting it in. 
Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a 
shaded, sandy hollow scooped out behind a broad 
flat rock in the form of a huge bathtub of water, 
clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose 
swarthy tint and strong features suggested the op- 
posite, was the least able to endure the hardships of 
the road, and lay lifeless in the shade at every op- 
portunity. 

The road panted by a rocky zigzag up out of the 
ravine again and on over rough and hilly going. 
Here I fell into conversation with an Indian finca 
laborer, a slow, patient, ox-like fellow, to whom it 
had plainly never occurred to ask himself why he 
should live in misery and his employers in luxury. 
He spoke a slow and labored, yet considerable, Span- 
ish, of which he was unable to pronounce the f or v ; 
saying " pinca " for finca and " pale " for vale. 
Those of his class worked from five to five shoveling 
coffee or carrying it, with two hours off for break- 
fast and almuerzo, were paid one Guatemalan dollar 
a day, that is, a fraction over five cents in our money, 
and furnished two arrobas (fifty pounds) of corn 



272 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

and frijoles and a half-pound of salt a month. Yet 
there are no more trustworthy employees than these 
underpaid fellows. As pay-day approaches, one of 
these same ragged Indians is given a grain sack and 
a check for several thousand dollars gold and sent to 
the town where the finca owner does his banking, 
often several days' distant. The sack half filled with 
the ragged bills of the Republic and their customary 
microbes, the Indian shoulders it and tramps back 
across the country to the estate, stopping at night in 
some wayside hut and tossing the sack into a corner, 
perhaps to leave it for hours while he visits his 
friends in the vicinity. Yet though both the mes- 
senger and his hosts know the contents of his bundle, 
it is very rare that a single illegible billete disappears 
en route. 

We plodded on into the night, but Ems could only 
drag at a turtle-pace, and it became evident we could 
not make Retalhuleu without giving him time to re- 
cuperate. The first large hut in the scattered vil- 
lage of Acintral gave us hospitality. It was earth- 
floored, with a few homemade chairs, and a bed with 
board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this was 
suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after 
a supper of jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. 
Dakin and I found it more than crowded, even after 
Ems had spread a petate, or grass-mat, on the 
ground. The room had no door, and women and 
girls wandered indifferently in and out of it as we 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 273 

undressed, one mite of barely six smoking a huge 
black cigar in the most business-like manner. The 
place was a species of saloon, like almost every hut 
along the road, and the shouting of the family and 
their thirsty townsmen seldom ceased even momen- 
tarily until after midnight. 

Having occasion to be in Guatemala City that day, 
I rose at two and, swallowing a cup of black coffee 
and two raw eggs and paying a bill of $12, struck 
out to cover the two long leagues left to Retalhuleu 
in time to catch the six-o'clock train. The moon 
on its waning quarter had just risen, but gave little 
assistance during an extremely difficult tramp. All 
was blackest darkness except where it cast a few 
silvery streaks through the trees, the road a mere 
wild trail left by the rainy season far rougher than 
any plowed field, where it would have been only too 
easy to break a leg or sprain an ankle. Bands of 
dogs, barking savagely, dashed out upon me from 
almost every hut. Besides four small rivers with 
little roofed bridges, there were many narrower 
streams or mud-holes to wade, and between them the 
way twisted and stumbled up and down over innumer- 
able hills that seemed mountains in the unfathomable 
darkness. When I had slipped and sprawled some 
two hours, a pair of Indians, the first to be found 
abroad, gave the distance as " dos leguas," in other 
words, the same as when I had started. I redoubled 
my speed, pausing only once to call for water where a 



274 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

light flickered in a hut, and seemed to have won the 
race when at the edge of the town I came to a river 
that required me to strip to the waist. As I sprinted 
up the hill beyond, the sound of a departing train 
drifted out of the darkness ahead and an Indian in- 
formed me that it had been scheduled to leave at five. 
Fortunately I continued, for it turned out to be a 
freight, and the daily passenger left at six, so that 
just as the east began to turn gray I was off on the 
long ride to the capital. 

The train takes twelve hours to make this run of 
129 miles by a three-foot gage railroad, stopping at 
every cluster of huts along the way. The third-class 
coach was little more than a box-car with two rough 
benches along its sides. The passengers were unpre- 
possessing ; most of them ragged, all of them unclean, 
generally with extremely bad teeth, much-pimpled 
faces, emaciated, and of undeveloped physique, their 
eyes still possessing some of the brightness but lack- 
ing the snap and glisten of those of Tehuantepec and 
the plateau. Many were chrome-yellow with fever. 
Ragged officers of law and disorder were numerous, 
often in bare feet, the same listless inefficiency show- 
ing in their weak, unproductive, unshaven features. 
The car grew so crowded I went to sit on the plat- 
form rail, as had a half-dozen already, though large 
signs on the door forbade it. 

It was after noon when we reached the first im- 
portant town, Esquintla. Here the tropics ended 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 275 

and the train began to climb, so slowly we could have 
stepped off anywhere, the vegetation visibly changing 
in character with every mile. On the now-crowded 
platform two natives alternately ordered American 
beer of the train-boy, at $5 a bottle! At Palin we 
were assailed by tattered vendors of all manner of 
fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guate- 
malteco cents. Amatitlan also swarmed with hawkers, 
but this time of candy in the form of animals of every 
known and imaginable species. Thereafter we wound 
round beautiful Lake Amatitlan, a dark, smooth 
stretch of water, swarming with fish and bottomless, 
according to my fellow platformers, flanked by slop- 
ing, green, shrub-clad banks that reflected themselves 
in it. The train crossed the middle of the lake by a 
stone dyke and climbed higher and ever higher, with 
splendid views of the perfect cone-shaped volcanoes 
Agua and Panteleon that have gradually thrown 
themselves up to be the highest in Guatemala and visi- 
ble from almost every part of the republic. It was 
growing dark when the first houses of Guatemala City 
appeared among the trees, and gradually and slowly 
we dragged into the station. A bare-footed police- 
man on the train took the names and biographies of 
all on board, as another had already done at Es- 
quintla, and we were free to crowd out into the rag- 
ged, one-story city with its languid mule-cars. 

In the " Hotel Colon " opposite Guatemala's chief 
theater and shouldering the president's house, which 



276 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

is tailor-shop and saloon below, the daily rate was 
$12. The food was more than plentiful, but would 
have been an insult to the stomach of a harvest-hand, 
the windowless room was musty and dirty, the walls 
splashed, spotted, and torn, and the bed was by far 
the worst I had occupied south of the Rio Grande, 
having not only a board floor but a mattress that 
seemed to be stuffed with broken and jagged rocks. 
Notwithstanding all which I slept the clock round. 

If there is any " sight " in Guatemala City besides 
its slashing sunlight and its surrounding volcanoes, 
and perhaps its swarms of Indians trotting to and 
from the market on Sundays, it is the relief map of 
the entire Republic inside the race-course. This is 
of cement, with real water to represent the lakes and 
oceans and (when it is turned on) the rivers. Every 
town, railway, and trail of any importance is marked, 
an aid to the vagabond that should be required by 
law of every country. On it I picked out easily the 
route of my further travels. The map covers a space 
as large as a moderate-sized house and is seen in all 
its details from the two platforms above it. Its 
only apparent fault is that the mountains and vol- 
canoes are out of all proportion in height. But ex- 
aggeration is a common Central-American failing. 

The city is populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabi- 
tants, monotonously flat, few buildings for dread of 
earthquake being over one story, even the national 
palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An ele- 




el 

ft 

o 
O 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 279 

vation of five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June 
weather, but life moves with a drowsy, self-contented 
air. Its people are far more obliging than the aver- 
age of Mexico and have little or none of the latter's 
sulkiness or half-insolence. Here reigns supreme 
Estrada Cabrera ; exactly where very few know, for 
so great is his dislike to assassination that he jumps 
about incessantly from one of his one-story resi- 
dences to another, perhaps, as his people assert, by 
underground passages, for he is seldom indeed seen 
in the flesh by his fond subjects. In less material 
manifestations he is omnipresent and few are the men 
who have long outlived his serious displeasure. A 
man of modest ability but of extremely suspicious 
temperament, he keeps the reins of government al- 
most entirely in his own hands, running the country 
as if it were his private estate, which for some years 
past it virtually has been. It is a form of govern- 
ment not entirely unfitted to a people in the bulk 
utterly indifferent as to who or what rules them so 
they are left to loaf in their hammocks in peace, and 
no more capable of ruling themselves than of lifting 
themselves by their non-existent boot-straps. Out- 
wardly life seems to run as smoothly as elsewhere, and 
the casual passer-by does not to his knowledge make 
the acquaintance of those reputed bands of adven- 
turers from many climes said to carry out swiftly and 
efficiently every whispered command of Guatemala's 
invisible ruler. 



280 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

On Sunday a bull-fight was perpetrated in the 
plaza de toros facing the station. It was a dreary 
caricature on the royal sport of Spain. The plaza 
was little more than a rounded barnyard, the four 
gaunt and cowardly animals with blunted horns vir- 
tually lifeless, picadors and horses were conspicu- 
ous by their absence, and the two matadors were not 
even skilful butchers. A cuadrilla of women did the 
" Suerte de Tancredo " on one another's backs — as 
any one else could have on his head or in a rocking- 
chair — and the only breath of excitement was when 
one of the feminine toreras got walked on by a fear- 
quaking animal vainly seeking an exit. All in all it 
was an extremely poor newsboys' entertainment, a 
means of collecting admissions for the privilege of 
seeing to-morrow's meat prepared, the butchers skin- 
ning and quartering the animals within the enclosure 
in full sight of the disheveled audience. 

The train mounted out of the capital with much 
winding, as many as three sections of track one above 
another at times, and, once over the range, fell in 
with a river on its way to the Atlantic. The coun- 
try grew dry and Mexican, covered with fine white 
dust and grown with cactus. At Zacapa, largest 
town of the line, Dakin was already at work in a ma- 
chine-shop on wheels in the railroad yards, and Ems 
was preparing to take charge of one of the locomo- 
tives. Descending with the swift stream, we soon 
plunged into thickening jungle, growing even more 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 281 

dense than that of Tehuantepec, with trees, plants, 
and all the stationary forms of nature struggling 
like an immense multitude fighting for life, the smaller 
and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and 
unassertive trampled to death underfoot on the 
dank, sunless ground. We crossed the now consid- 
erable river by a three-span bridge, and entered the 
banana country. English-speaking Negroes became 
numerous, and when we pulled in at the station of 
Quiragua, the collection of bamboo shanties I had ex- 
pected was displaced by several new and modern 
bungalows on the brow of a knoll overlooking the 
railroad. Here was one of the great plantations 
of the United Fruit Company. From the ver- 
anda of the office building broad miles of banana 
plants stretched away to the southern mountains. 
Jamaican Negroes were chiefly engaged in the banana 
culture, and those from our Southern States did the 
heavier and rougher work. Their wages ran as high 
as a dollar gold a day, as against a Guatemalan peso 
for the native peons of the coffee estates in other sec- 
tions. Much of the work was let out on contract. 
There were a number of white American employees, 
college-trained in some cases, and almost all ex- 
tremely youthful. The heat here was tropical and 
heavy, the place being a bare three hundred feet 
above sea-level where even clothing quickly molds 
and rots. My fellow countrymen had found the most 
dangerous pastimes in this climate to be drinking 



282 TRAMPING THROUGH GUATEMALA 

liquor and eating bananas, while the mass of em- 
ployees more often came to grief in the feuds between 
the various breeds of Negroes and with the natives. 

In the morning a handcar provided with a seat and 
manned by two muscular Carib Negroes carried me 
away through the banana jungle by a private rail- 
road. The atmosphere was thick and heavy as 
soured milk. A half-hour between endless walls of 
banana plants brought me to a palm-leaf hut, from 
which I splashed away on foot through a riot of 
wet jungle to the famous ruins of Quiragua. Arche- 
ologists had cleared a considerable square in the 
wilderness, still within the holdings of the fruit com- 
pany, felling many enormous trees ; but the place was 
already half choked again with compact under- 
growth. There were three immense stone pillars in 
a row, then two others leaning at precarious angles, 
while in and out through the adjacent jungle were 
scattered carved stones in the forms of frogs and 
other animals, clumsily depicted, a small calendar 
stone, and an immense carved rock reputed to have 
been a place of sacrifice. Several artificial mounds 
were now mere stone hills overgrown with militant 
vegetation, as were remnants of old stone roadways. 
Every stone was covered with distinct but crudely 
carved figures, the most prominent being that of a 
king with a large Roman nose but very little chin, 
wearing an intricate crown surmounted by a death's- 
head, holding a scepter in one hand and in the other 



HURRYING THROUGH GUATEMALA 283 

what appeared to be a child spitted on a toasting 
fork. All was of a species of sandstone that has 
withstood the elements moderately well, especially if, 
as archeologists assert, the ruins represent a city 
founded some three thousand years ago. Some of 
the faces, however, particularly those toward the 
east and south from which come most of the storms, 
were worn almost smooth and were covered with moss 
and throttling vegetation. Through it all a mist 
that was virtually a rain fell incessantly, and ground 
and jungle reeked with a clinging mud and dripping 
water that soaked through shoes and garments. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 

THE train carried me back up the river to Za- 
capa, desert dry and stingingly hot with noon- 
day. Report had it that there was a good road to 
Jocotan by way of Chiquimula, but the difference be- 
tween a " buen camino " and a mere " road " is so 
slight in Central America that I concluded to follow 
the more direct trail. The next essential was to 
change my wealth into Honduranean silver, chiefly 
in coins of one real, corresponding in value to an 
American nickel; for financial transactions were apt 
to be petty in the region ahead of me. In the col- 
lection I gathered among the merchants of Zacapa 
were silver dollars of Mexico, Salvador, Chile, and 
Peru, all of which stand on terms of perfect equal- 
ity with the peso of Honduras, worth some forty 
cents. My load was heavier, as befitted an exit from 
even quasi-civilization. The rucksack was packed 
with more than fourteen pounds, not counting kodak 
and weapon, and for the equivalent of some thirty 
cents in real money I had acquired in the market of 

Guatemala City a hammock, more exactly a sleep- 

284 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 285 

ing-net, made of a species of grass by the Indians of 
Coban. 

Under all this I was soon panting up through the 
once cobbled village of Zacapa and across a rising 
sand-patch beyond, cheered on by the parting infor- 
mation that the last traveler to set out on this route 
had been killed a few miles from town for the $2 
or so he carried. Mine would not have been any 
particular burden in a level or temperate country, 
but this was neither. The sun hung so close it felt 
like some immense red-hot ingot swinging overhead 
in a foundry. The road — and in Central Amer- 
ica that word seldom represents anything better than 
a rocky, winding trail with rarely a level yard — 
sweated up and down sharp mountain faces, pick- 
ing its way as best it could over a continual succes- 
sion of steep lofty ridges. Even before I lost the 
railway to view I was dripping wet from cap to 
shoes, drops fell constantly from the end of my nose, 
and my eyes stung with salt even though I plunged 
my face into every stream. My American shoes had 
succumbed on the tramp to Retalhuleu and the best 
I had been able to do in Guatemala City was to 
squander $45 for a pair of native make and chop 
them down into Oxfords. These, soaked in the jun- 
gle of Quiragu^, now dried iron-stiff in the sun and 
barked my feet in various places. 

I had crossed four ranges and was winding along 
a narrow, dense-grown valley when night began to 



286 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

fall. The rumors of foul play led me to keep a 
hand hanging loose near my weapon, though the few 
natives I met seemed friendly enough. Darkness 
thickened and I was planning to swing my hammock 
among the trees when I fell upon the hut of Coronado 
Cordon. It was a sieve-like structure of bamboo, 
topped by a thick palm-leaf roof, with an outdoor 
mud fireplace, and crowded with dogs, pigs, and 
roosted fowls. Coronado himself, attired in the 
remnants of a pair of cotton trousers, greeted me 
from his hammock. 

" May I pass the night with you? " 

" To be sure, sefior. You may sleep on this bench 
under the roof." 

But I produced my hammock and he swung it for 
me from two bamboo rafters of the low projecting 
eaves, beside his own and that of a horseman who 
had also sought hospitality, where a steady breeze 
swept through. His wife squatted for an hour or 
more over the fireplace, and at length I sat down — 
on the ground — to black coffee, frijoles, tortillas, 
and a kind of Dutch cheese. 

Long before morning I was too cold, even under 
most of the contents of my pack, to sleep soundly. 
It was December and the days were short for tramp- 
ing. This one did not begin to break until six and 
I had been awake and ready since three. Coronado 
slept on, but his seiiora arose and, covering her 
breasts with a small apron, took to grinding corn for 




I topped a ridge and caught sight at last of Santa Rosa, first town 
of any size in Honduras 




Soldiers of Santa Rosa eating in the market-place 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 289 

tortillas. These with coffee and two eggs dropped 
for a moment in hot water, after a pin-hole had been 
broken in each, made up my breakfast, and brought 
my bill up to nearly eleven cents. 

I was off in the damp dawn. Any enumeration of 
the rocky, slippery, twisting trails by which I panted 
up and over perpendicular mountain ridges under 
a burning sun without the shadow of a cloud, would 
be wearisome. Sweat threatened to ruin even the 
clothing in my bundle, it soaked even belt and hol- 
ster, rusting the weapon within it, and leaving a 
visible trail behind me. Once, at the careless nod 
of an Indian, I strained up an all but perpendicular 
slope, only to have the trail end hundreds of feet 
above the river in a fading cow-path and leave me 
to climb down again. Farther on it dodged from 
under my feet once more and, missing a reputed 
bridge, forced me to ford a chest-deep river which 
all but swept me away, possessions and all, at the 
first attempt. 

Jocotan, on the farther bank, was a lazy, sun- 
baked village the chief industry of which seemed to be 
swinging in hammocks, though I did manage to run 
to earth the luxury of a dish of tough meat. Co- 
motan was close beyond, then came two hours 
straight up to a region of pine-trees with vistas of 
never-ending mountains everywhere dense-forested, 
the few adobe or bamboo huts tucked in among them 
being as identically alike as the inhabitants. These 



290 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

were almost obsequious peons, wearing a sort of white 
pajamas and moderate-sized straw hats, all strangely 
clean. Each carried a machete, generally with a 
curved point, and not a few had guns. Toward even- 
ing I struck a bit of level going amid dense vegeta- 
tion without a breath of air along the bank of a river 
that must be forded lower down, which fact I took 
advantage of to perpetrate a general laundering. 
This proved unwise, for the sun went down before 
the garments had dried and left me to lug on along 
the stream those the unexacting customs of the coun- 
try did not require me to put on wet. Every hun- 
dred yards the trail went swiftly down into the stony 
bed of a tributary, with or without water, and clam- 
bered breathlessly out again. A barked heel had 
festered and made every other step painful. 

It was more than an hour after dark that I 
sweated into the aldea of Chupa, so scattered that as 
each hut refused me lodging I had to hobble on a 
considerable distance to the next. The fourth or 
fifth refusal I declined to accept and swung my ham- 
mock under the eaves. A woman was cooking on 
the earth floor for several peon travelers, but treated 
me only with a stony silence. One of the Indians, 
however, who had been a soldier and was more 
friendly or less suspicious of " gringoes," divided 
with me his single tortilla and bowl of frijoles. The 
family slept on dried cowskins spread on the bare 
earth. 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 291 

Food was not to be had when I folded my hammock 
and pushed on at daylight. One of a cluster of huts 
farther up was given over to a squad of " sol- 
diers," garrisoning the frontier, and an officer who 
would have ranked as a vagabond in another 
country sold me three tortillas and a shellful of 
coffee saved from his rations. Another cluster 
of huts marked the beginning of a stiff rocky climb, 
beyond which I passed somewhere in a swampy 
stretch of uninhabited ground the invisible bound- 
ary and entered Honduras, the Land of Great 
Depths. 

It was indeed. Soon a vast mountain covered 
with pine forest rose into the sky ahead and two 
hours of unbroken climbing brought me only to the 
rim of another great wooded valley scolloped out of 
the earth and down into which I went all but head- 
first into the town of Copan. Here, as I sat in a 
fairly easy chair in the shaded corner of a barnyard 
among pigs, chickens, and turkeys while my tortillas 
were preparing, I got the first definite information 
as to the tramp before me. Tegucigalpa, the capi- 
tal, was said to be fifteen days distant by mule. On 
foot it might prove a trifle less. But if transpor- 
tation in the flesh was laborious and slow, the ease of 
verbal communication partly made up for it. A 
telegram to the capital cost me the sum total of one 
real. It should have been a real and a quarter, but 
the telegraph operator had no change ! 



292 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

Beyond the town I found with some difficulty the 
gate through which one must pass to visit the an- 
cient ruins of Copan. Once inside it, a path led 
through jungle and tobacco fields and came at length 
to a great artificial mound, originally built of cut- 
stone, but now covered with deep grass and a splen- 
did grove of immense trees, until in appearance only 
a natural hill remained. About the foot of this, 
throttled by vegetation, lay scattered a score or more 
of carved stones, only one or two of which were par- 
ticularly striking. Summer solitude hovered over all 
the scene. 

Back again on the " camino real " I found the 
going for once ideal. The way lay almost level along 
a fairly wide strip of lush-green grass with only 
a soft-footed, eight-inch path marking the route, and 
heavy jungle giving unbroken shade. Then came 
a hard climb, just when I had begun to hear the river 
and was laying plans for a drink and a swim, and 
the trail led me far up on the grassy brow of a 
mountain, from which spread a vast panorama of 
pine-clad world. But the trails of Honduras are like 
spendthrift adventurers, struggling with might and 
main to gain an advantage, only wantonly to throw 
it away again a moment later. This one pitched 
headlong down again, then climbed, then descended 
over and again, as if setting itself some useless task 
for the mere pleasure of showing its powers of en- 
durance. It subsided at last in the town of Santa 




Christmas dinner on the road in Honduras 




Several times I met the families of soldiers tramping northward 
with all their possessions 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 295 

Rita, the comandante of which, otherwise a pleas- 
ant enough fellow, took me for a German. It served 
me right for not having taken the time to shave my 
upper lip. He had me write my name on a slip of 
paper and bade me adios with the information that 
if " my legs were well oiled " I could make the haci- 
enda Jarral by nightfall. 

I set a good pace along the flat, shaded, grassy 
lane beside the river, promising myself a swim upon 
sighting my destination. But the tricky trail sud- 
denly and unexpectedly led me far up on a moun- 
tain flank and down into Jarral without again catch- 
ing sight or sound of the stream. There were three 
or four palm-leaf huts and a large, long hacienda 
building, unspeakably dirty and dilapidated. The 
estate produced coffee, heaps of which in berry and 
kernel stood here and there in the dusk. The owner 
lived elsewhere; for which no one could blame him. 
I marched out along the great tile-floored veranda 
to mention to the stupid mayordomo the relation- 
ship of money and food. He referred me to a filth- 
encrusted woman in the cavern-like kitchen, where 
three soiled and bedraggled babies slept on a dirtier 
reed mat on the filthy earth floor, another in a ham- 
mock made of a grain sack and two pieces of rope, 
amid dogs, pigs, and chickens, not to mention other 
unpleasantnesses, including a damp dungeon atmos- 
phere that ought early to have proved fatal to the 
infants. When she had sulkily agreed to prepare me 



296 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

tortillas, I returned to ask the way to the river. 
The mayordomo cried out in horror at the notion 
of bathing at night, pointing out that there was not 
even a moon, and prophesying a fatal outcome of 
such foolhardiness and gringo eccentricity. His ap- 
pearance suggested that he had also some strong su- 
perstition against bathing by day. 

I stumbled nearly a mile along to-morrow's road, 
stepping now and then into ankle-deep mud puddles, 
before reaching the stream, but a plunge into a 
stored-up pool of it was more than ample reward. 
" Supper " was ready upon my return, and by 
asking the price of it at once and catching the 
woman by surprise I was charged only a legitimate 
amount. When I inquired where I might swing 
my hammock, the enemy of bathing pointed silently 
upward at the rafters of the veranda. These 
were at least ten feet above the tiled floor and I 
made several ineffectual efforts before I could reach 
them at all, and then only succeeded in hanging my 
sleeping-net so that it doubled me up like a jack- 
knife. Rearranging it near the corner of the ver- 
anda, I managed with great effort to climb into it, 
but to have fallen out would have been to drop either 
some eight feet to the stone-flagged door or twenty 
into the cobbled and filthy barnyard below. The 
chances of this outcome were much increased by the 
necessity of using a piece of old rope belonging to 
the hacienda, and a broken arm or leg would have 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 297 

been pleasant indeed here in the squalid wilderness 
with at least a hundred miles of mule-trail to the 
nearest doctor. 

Luckily I only fell asleep. Several men and 
dirtier boys, all in what had once been white gar- 
ments, had curled up on bundles of dirty mats and 
heaps of bags all over the place, and the night was a 
pandemonium of their coughing, snoring, and night- 
maring, mingled with the hubbub of dogs, roosters, 
turkeys, cattle, and a porcine multitude that snug- 
gled in among the human sleepers. The place was 
surrounded by wet, pine-clad mountains, and the 
damp night air drifting in upon me soon grew cold 
and penetrating. 

Having had time to collect her wits, the female 
of the dungeon charged me a quadrupled price for 
a late breakfast of black coffee and pin-holed eggs, 
and I set off on what turned out to be a not en- 
tirely pleasant day's tramp. To begin with I had 
caught cold in a barked heel, causing the cords of the 
leg to swell and stiffen. Next I found that the 
rucksack had worn through where it came in con- 
tact with my back ; third, the knees of the breeches 
I wore succumbed to the combination of sweat and 
the tearing of jungle grasses; fourth, the garments 
I carried against the day I should again enter civili- 
zation were already rumpled and stained almost be- 
yond repair ; and, fifth, but by no means last, the few 
American bills I carried in a secret pocket had 



298 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

been almost effaced by humidity and friction. Fur- 
thermore, the " road " completely surpassed all hu- 
man powers of description. When it was not split- 
ting into a half-dozen faint paths, any one of which 
was sure to fade from existence as soon as it had suc- 
ceeded in leading me astray in a panting chase up 
some perpendicular slope, it was splashing through 
mud-holes or small rivers. At the first stream I 
squandered a half-hour disrobing and dressing again, 
only to find that some two hundred yards farther 
on it swung around once more across the trail. 
Twice it repeated that stale practical joke. At the 
fourth crossing I forestalled it by marching on, car- 
rying all but shirt and hat, — anS got only sunburn 
and stone-bruises for my foresight, for the thing dis- 
appeared entirely. Still farther on I attempted to 
save time by crossing another small river by a series 
of stepping-stones, reached the middle of it dry-shod, 
looked about for the next step, and then carefully lay 
down at full length, baggage and all, in the stream as 
the stone turned over under my feet. But by that 
time I needed another bath. 

An old woman of La Libertad, a collection of mud 
huts wedged into a little plain between jungled moun- 
tain-sides, answered my hungry query with a cheery 
" Como no ! " and in due time set before me black 
beans and blacker coffee and a Honduranean tortilla, 
which are several times thicker and heavier than those 
of Mexico and taste not unlike a plank of dough. 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 301 

Though often good-hearted enough, these children 
of the wilderness have no more inkling of any line be- 
tween dirt and cleanliness, nor any more desire to im- 
prove their conditions, themselves, or their surround- 
ings, which we of civilized lands think of as 
humanity's privilege and requirement, than the 
mangy yellow curs that slink in and out between their 
legs and among their cooking pots. I had yet to see 
in Honduras a house, a garment, a single possession, 
or person that was anything short of filthy. 

As I ate, a gaunt and yellow youth arrived with a 
rag tied about his brow, complaining that a fever had 
overtaken him on a steep mountain trail and left him 
helpless for hours. I made use for the first time of 
the small medicine case I carried. Then the old 
woman broke in to announce that her daughter also 
had fever. I found a child of ten tossing on a miser- 
able canvas cot in the mud hut before which I sat, 
her pulse close to the hundred mark. When I had 
treated her to the best of my ability, the mother 
stated that a friend in a neighboring hut had been 
suffering for more than a week with chills and fever, 
but that she was " embarrassed " and must not take 
anything that might bring that condition prema- 
turely to a head. I prescribed not without some 
layman misgiving. Great astonishment spread 
throughout the hamlet when I refused payment for 
my services, and the old woman not only vociferously 
declined the coin I proffered for the food, but bade 



302 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

me farewell with a vehement " Dios se lo pagara " — 
whether in Honduranean change or not she did not 
specify. The majority of the inhabitants of the 
wilds of Honduras live and die without any other 
medical attention than those of a rare wandering 
charlatan or pill-peddler. 

Beyond was a rising path through dense steaming 
jungle, soon crossed by the ubiquitous river. 
Across it, near a pretty waterfall, the trail climbed 
up and ever up through jungle and forest, often deep 
in mud and in places so steep I had to mount on all 
fours, slipping back at each step like the proverbial 
frog in the well. A splendid virgin forest sur- 
rounded me, thick with undergrowth, the immense 
trees whispering together far above. A half-hour 
up, the trail, all but effaced, was cut off by a newly 
constructed rail fence tied together with vines run 
through holes that had been pierced in the buttresses 
of giants of the forest. There was no other route in 
sight, however, and I climbed the obstruction and 
sweated another half-hour upward. A vista of at 
least eight heavily wooded ranges opened out behind 
me, not an inch of which was not covered with dense- 
green treetops. Far up near the gates of heaven I 
came upon a sun-flooded sloping clearing planted 
with tobacco, and found a startled peon in the shade 
of a make-shift leaf hut. Instead of climbing the 
hill by this private trail, I should immediately have 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 303 

crossed the river again more than an hour below 
and continued on along it ! 

When he had recovered from the fright caused by 
so unexpected an apparition, the Indian yielded up 
his double-bodied gourd and made no protest when 
I gurgled down about half the water he had carried 
up the mountain for his day's thirst. That at least 
was some reward for the useless climb, for there is 
no greater physical pleasure than drinking one's fill 
of clear cold water after a toilsome tropical tramp. 
I crashed and slid down to the river again and picked 
up once more the muddy path along it between dense 
walls of damp jungle. It grew worse and worse, 
falling in with a smaller stream and leaping back 
and forth across it every few yards, sometimes per- 
mitting me to dodge across like a tight-rope walker 
on wet mossy stones, more often delaying me to re- 
move shoes and leggings. An hour of this and the 
scene changed. A vast mountain wall rose before 
me, and a sharp rocky trail at times like steps cut 
by nature in the rock face led up and up and still 
forever upward. A score of times I seemed to have 
reached the summit, only to find that the trail, took 
a new turn and, gathering up its skirts, climbed away 
again until all hope of its ever ceasing its sweating 
ascent faded away. After all it was perhaps well 
that only a small portion of the climb was seen at a 
time; like life itself, the appalling sight of all the 



304* TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

difficulties ahead at once might discourage the climber 
from ever undertaking the task. 

It was near evening when I came out in a slight 
clearing on what was at last really the summit. Vast 
forests of whispering pine-trees surrounded me, and 
before and behind lay an almost endless vista of 
heavily wooded, tumbled mountains, on a low one of 
which, near at hand but far below, could be seen the 
scattered village of San Augustin. There was still a 
long hour down the opposite face of the mountain, 
with thinner pine forests and the red soil showing 
through here and there ; not all down either, for the 
trail had the confirmed habit of falling into bot- 
tomless sharp gullies every few yards and strug- 
gling out again up the steepest of banks, though the 
privilege of thrusting my face into the clear moun- 
tain stream at the bottom of each made me pardon 
these monotonous vagaries. After surmounting six 
or eight such mountain ranges in a day, under a sun 
like ours of August quadrupled and some twenty 
pounds of awkward baggage, without what could 
reasonably be called food, to say nothing of festered 
heels and similar petty ailments, the traveler comes 
gradually by nightfall to develop a desire to spend ten 
minutes under the electric fans of a " Baltimore 
Lunch." 

Yet with all its difficulties the day had been more 
than enjoyable, wandering through endless virgin 
forests swarming with strange and beautiful forms 




The great military force of Esperanza compelled to draw up and 
face my camera 




The prisoners in their chains form an interested audience across the 

street 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 307 

of plant and bird life, with rarely a habitation or a 
fellow-man to break the spell of pure, unadulterated 
nature. For break it these did. As the first hut of 
San Augustin intruded itself in the growing dusk 
there ran unbidden through my head an ancient re- 
frain : 

"Plus je vois l'homme, plus j'aime mon chien." 

Nearer the center of the collection I paused to ask 
a man leaning against his mud doorway whether he 
knew any one who would give me posada. The eager- 
ness with which he offered to do so himself gave me 
visions of an exorbitant bill in the morning, but it 
turned out that he was merely anxious for the 
" honor " of lodging a stranger. This time I slept 
indoors. My host himself swung my hammock from 
two of the beams in his large, single-room house 
made of slats filled in with mud. Though a man of 
some education, subscriber to a newspaper of Salva- 
dor and an American periodical in Spanish, and sur- 
rounded by pine forests, it seemed never to have 
occurred to him to try to better his lot even to the 
extent of putting in a board floor. His mixture of 
knowledge and ignorance was curious. He knew 
most of the biography of Edison by heart, but 
thought Paris the capital of the United States and 
the population of that country 700,000. 

In the house the only food was tortillas, but across 
the " street " meat was for sale. It proved to be 



308 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

tough strips a half-inch square of sun-dried beef 
hanging from the rafters. I made another sugges- 
tion, but the woman replied with a smile half of 
amusement half of sorrow that all the chickens had 
died. A few beans were found, and, as I ate, several 
men drifted into the hut and gradually and diffidently 
fell to asking strange and childish questions. It is 
hard for those of us trained to democracy and ac- 
customed to intercourse only with " civilized " people 
to realize that a bearded man of forty, with tall and 
muscular frame, may have only an infantile grade 
of intelligence, following the conversation while it is 
kept on the plane of an eight-year-old intellect, but 
incapable of grasping any real thought, and staring 
with the open-mouthed naivete of a child. 

Tobacco is grown about San Augustin, and every 
woman of the place rolls clumsy cigars and cigarettes 
as incessantly as those of other parts knit or sew. 
The wife and daughter of my host were so engaged 
when I returned, toiling leisurely by the light of pine 
splinters ; for rural Honduras has not yet reached 
the candle stage of progress. For a half-real I 
bought thirty cigarettes of the size of a lead-pencil, 
made of the coarse leaves more fitted to cigars. The 
man and wife, and the child that had been stark naked 
ever since my arrival, at length rolled up together 
on a bundle of rags on the dank earth floor, the 
daughter of eighteen climbed a knotched stick into a 
cubbyhole under the roof, and when the pine splinter 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 309 

flickered out I was able for the first night in Hon- 
duras to get out of my knee-cramping breeches and 
into more comfortable sleeping garments. The 
festered heel gave me considerable annoyance. A 
bread and milk poultice would no doubt have drawn 
the fever out of it, but even had any such luxury 
been obtainable I should have applied it internally. 
During the night I awoke times without number. 
Countless curs, that were to real dogs what these 
people are to civilized races, howled the night hideous, 
as if warning the village periodically of some im- 
aginary danger, suggested perhaps by the scent of a 
stranger in their midst. Sometime in the small hours 
two youths, either drunk or enamored of the be- 
draggled senorita in the cubbyhole above, struck up 
a mournful, endless ballad of two unvarying lines, 
the one barely heard, the other screeching the eternal 
refrain until the night shuddered with it. All the 
clothing I possessed was not enough to keep me warm 
both above and below. 

One of the chief difficulties of the road in Honduras 
is the impossibility of arousing the lazy inhabitants 
in time to prepare some suggestion of breakfast at a 
reasonably early hour. For to set off without eating 
may be to fast all the hot and laborious day. The 
sun was already warm when I took up the task of 
picking my way from among the many narrow, red, 
labyrinthian paths that scattered over the hill on 
which San Augustin reposes and radiated into the 



310 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

rocky, pine-forested, tumbled mountain world sur- 
rounding it. Some one had said the trail to Santa 
Rosa was easy and comparatively level. But such 
words have strange meanings in Honduras. Not 
once during the day did there appear a level space 
ten yards in length. Hour after hour a narrow 
path, one of a score in which to go astray, worn in 
the whitish rock of a tumbled and irregular series of 
soft sandstone ridges with thin forests of pine or 
fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly 
by slopes steeper than any stairway, until I felt like 
the overworked chambermaid of a tall but elevator- 
less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make 
things worse the region was arid and waterless. 
Once I came upon a straggling mud village, but 
though it was half-hidden by banana and orange 
groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day 
or two before some scoundrel had passed this way 
eating oranges constantly and strewing the trail with 
the tantalizing peelings ; a methodical, selfish, bour- 
geois fellow, who had not had the humane careless- 
ness to drop a single fruit on all his gluttonous 
j ourney. 

When I came at last, at the bottom of a thigh- 
straining descent, upon the first stream of the day, 
it made up for the aridity behind, for the path had 
eluded me and left me to tear through the jungle and 
wade a quarter mile before I picked up the trail 
again. Refreshed, I began a task before which I 




-^3*ii 



Honduras, the Land of Great Depths 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 313 

might have turned back had I seen it all at once. 
Four mortal waterless hours I toiled steeply upward, 
more than twenty times sure I had reached the sum- 
mit, only to see the trail, like some will-o'-the-wisp, 
draw on ahead unattainably in a new direction. I 
had certainly ascended four thousand feet when I 
threw myself down at last among the pines of the 
wind-swept summit. A draught from the gourd of 
a passing peon gave me new life for the correspond- 
ing descent. Several of these fellow-roadsters now 
appeared, courteous fellows, often with black mus- 
taches and imperial a la Napoleon III, who raised 
their hats and greeted me with a sing-song " Que 
se vaya bien," yet seemed remarkably stupid and 
perhaps a trifle treacherous. At length, well on in 
the afternoon, the road broke through a cutting and 
disclosed the welcome sight of the town of Santa 
Rosa, its white church bulking above all else built 
by man ; the first suggestion of civilization I had seen 
in Honduras. 

The suggestion withered upon closer examination. 
The place did not know the meaning of the word 
hotel, there was neither restaurant, electric light, 
wheeled vehicles, nor any of the hundred and one 
things common to civilized towns of like size. After 
long inquiry for lodging, I was directed to a phar- 
macy. The connection was not apparent until I 
found that an American doctor occupied there a tiny 
room made by partitioning off with a strip of canvas 



314* TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

stretched on a frame a part of the public hallway to 
the patio. He was absent on his rounds ; which was 
fortunate, for his Cuban interpreter not merely gave 
me possession of the " room " and cot, but delivered 
to me the doctor's supper of potatoes, rice, an imi- 
tation of bread, and even a piece of meat, when it 
arrived from a market-place kitchen. Here I spent 
Sunday, with the extreme lassitude following an ex- 
tended tramp in the hungry wilderness. The doctor 
turned up in the afternoon, an imposing monument 
of a man from Texas with a wild tangle of dark- 
brown beard, and the soft eyes and gentle manners 
of a girl. He had spent some months in the region, 
more to the advantage of the inhabitants than his 
own, for disease was far more wide spread than 
wealth, and the latter was extremely elusive even 
where it existed. Hookworm was the second most 
common ailment, with cancer and miscarriages fre- 
quent. The entire region he had found virtually 
given over to free love. The grasping priests made 
it all but impossible for the poorer classes to marry, 
and the custom had rather died out even among the 
well-to-do. All but two f amilies of the town acknowl- 
edged illegitimate children, there was not a priest 
nor a youth of eighteen who had not several, and 
more than one widow of Honduranean wealth and 
position whose husband had long since died con- 
tinued to add yearly to the population. The padre 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 315 

of San Pedro, from whose house he had just come, 
boasted of being the father of eighty children. All 
these things were common knowledge, with almost no 
attempt at concealment, and indeed little notion that 
there might be anything reprehensible in such cus- 
toms. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? 
Later experience proved these conditions, as well as 
nearly 90 per cent, of complete illiteracy, common 
to all Honduras. 

The only other industry of Santa Rosa is the rais- 
ing of tobacco and the making of a tolerably good 
cigar, famed throughout Honduras and selling here 
twenty for a real. Every hut and almost every shop 
is a cigar factory. The town is four thousand feet 
above sea-level, giving it a delightful, lazy, satisfied- 
with-life-just-as-it-is air that partly makes up for 
its ignorance, disease, and unmorality. The popula- 
tion is largely Indian, unwashed since birth, and with 
huge hoof-like bare feet devoid of sensation. There 
is also considerable Spanish blood, generally adulter- 
ated, its possessors sometimes shod and wearing 
nearly white cotton suits and square white straw 
hats. In intelligence the entire place resembles chil- 
dren without a child's power of imitation. Except 
for the snow-white church, the town is entirely one- 
story, with tile roofs, a ragged flowery plaza, and 
straight streets, sometimes cobbled, that run off down 
hill, for the place is built on a meadowy knoll with a 



316 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

fine vista of hills and surrounded by an immensely 
rich land that would grow almost anj^thing in 
abundance with a minimum of cultivation. 

The one way of getting an early start in Honduras 
is to make your purchases the night before and eat 
them raw in the morning. Christmas day had barely 
dawned, therefore, when I began losing my way 
among the undulating white rock paths beyond Santa 
Rosa. Such a country brings home to man his 
helplessness and unimportance before untamed na- 
ture. I wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred 
miles away, within five days ; yet all the wealth of 
Croesus could not have brought me there in that time. 
As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and 
many is the animal that succumbs to the up and down 
trails of Honduras. This one might, were such trite- 
ness permissible, have been most succinctly charac- 
terized by a well-known description of war. It was 
rougher than any stone-quarry pitched at impossible 
angles, and the attraction of gravity for my burden 
passed belief. To this I had been forced to add not 
merely a roll of silver reales but my Christmas din- 
ner, built up about the nucleus of a can of what an- 
nounced itself outwardly as pork and beans. Tal- 
gua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so 
solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a 
tumble-down stone bridge, then by a hammock-bridge 
to which one climbed high above the river by a 
notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross- 




A corner of Tegucigalpa 




The "West Pointers" of Honduras in their barracks, a part of the 
national palace 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 319 

slats were missing, while the rest cracked or broke 
under the 185 pounds to which I subjected them. 

I promised myself to pitch camp at the very next 
clear stream. But the hammock-bridge once passed 
there began a heart-breaking climb into bone-dry 
hills, rolling with broken stones, and palpitating with 
the heat of an unshaded tropical sun. Several times 
I had perished of thirst before I came to a small 
sluggish stream, only to find its water deep blue with 
some pollution. In the end I was forced to overlook 
this drawback and, finding a sort of natural bathtub 
among the blazing rocks, fell upon what after all 
proved to be a porkless feast. The doctor's treat- 
ment had reduced the swelling in foot and ankle, but 
the wound itself was more painful than ever and 
called for frequent soaking. In midafternoon I 
passed a second village, as somnolent as the belly- 
gorged zopilotes that half -jumped, half-flew slug- 
gishly out of the way as I advanced. Here was a bit 
of fairly flat and shaded going, with another pre- 
carious hammock-bridge, then an endless woods with 
occasional sharp stony descents to some brawling 
but most welcome stream, with stepping-stones or 
without. Thus far I had seen barely a human being 
all the day, but as the shades of evening grew I 
passed several groups of arrieros who blasted my 
hopes of reaching Gracias that night, but who in- 
formed me that just beyond the " rio grande " was 
a casita where I might spend the night. 



320 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

It was sunset when I came to the " great river," a 
broad and noisy though only waist-deep stream with 
two sheer, yet pine-clad rock cliffs more striking than 
the Palisades of the Hudson. A crescent moon was 
peering over them when I passed the swinging bridge 
swaying giddily to and fro high above the stream, but 
on the steep farther bank it lighted up only a cruel 
disappointment. For the " casita " was nothing but 
a roof on wabbly legs, a public rest-house where I 
might swing my hammock but go famished to bed. 
I pushed on in quest of a more human habitation. 
The " road " consisted of a dozen paths shining white 
in the moonlight and weaving in and out among each 
other. No sign of man appeared, and my foot pro- 
tested vehemently. I concluded to be satisfied with 
water to drink and let hunger feed upon itself. But 
now it was needed, not a trickle appeared. Once I 
fancied I heard a stream babbling below and tore my 
way through the jungle down a sharp slope, but I 
had only caught the echo of the distant river. It 
was well on into the night when the welcome sound 
again struck my ear. This time it was real, and I 
fought my way down through clutching undergrowth 
and stone heaps to a stream, sluggish and blue in 
color, but welcome for all that, to swing my ham- 
mock among stone heaps from two elastic saplings, 
for it was just my luck to have found the one spot 
in Honduras where there were no trees large enough 
to furnish shelter. Luckily nothing worse than a 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 321 

heavy dew fell. Now and then noisy boisterous 
bands of natives passed along the trail from their 
Christmas festivities in the town ahead. But 
whereas a Mexican highway at this hour would have 
been overrun with drunken peons more or less dan- 
gerous to " gringoes," drink seemed to have made 
these chiefly amorous. Still I took good care to ar- 
range myself for the night quietly, if only to be able 
to sleep undisturbed. Once, somewhere in the dark- 
est hours, a drove of cattle stampeded down the slope 
near me, but even as I reached for my weapon I 
found it was not the band of peons from a dream of 
which I had awakened. The spot was some 1500 feet 
lower than Santa Rosa, but still so sharp and pene- 
trating is the chill of night in this region in contrast 
to the blazing, sweating days that I did not sleep a 
moment soundly after the first hour of evening. 

An hour's walk next morning brought me to 
Gracias, a slovenly, nothing-to-do-but-stare hamlet 
of a few hundred inhabitants. After I had eaten all 
the chief hut could supply, I set about looking for the 
shoemaker my already aged Guatemalan Oxfords 
needed so badly. I found the huts where several of 
them lived, but not where any of them worked. The 
first replied from his hammock that he was sick, the 
second had gone to Tegucigalpa, the third was 
" somewhere about town if you have the patience to 
wait." Which I did for an hour or more, and was 
rewarded with his turning up to inform me that he 



322 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

was not planning to begin his labors again so soon, 
for only yesterday had been Christmas. 

Over the first hill and river beyond, I fell in with 
a woman who carried on an unbroken conversation 
as well as a load on her head, from the time she ac- 
cepted the first cigar until we had waded the thigh- 
deep " rio grande " and climbed the rocky bank to 
her hut and garden. At first she had baldly refused 
to allow her picture to be taken. But so weak-willed 
are these people of Honduras that a white man of 
patience can in time force them to do his bidding by 
sheer force of will, by merely looking long and fixedly 
at them. Many the " gringo " who has misused this 
power in Central America. Before we reached her 
home she had not only posed but insisted on my 
stopping to photograph her with her children 
" dressed up " as befitted so extraordinary an occa- 
sion. Her garden was unusually well supplied with 
fruit and vegetables, and the rice boiled in milk she 
served was the most savory dish I had tasted in Hon- 
duras. She refused payment, but insisted on my 
waiting until the muleteers she had charged for their 
less sumptuous dinner were gone, so they should not 
discover her unpatriotic favoritism. 

During the afternoon there was for a time almost 
level going, grassy and soft, across gently dipping 
meadows on which I left both mule-trains and pe- 
destrians behind. Houses were rare, and the fall 
of night threatened to leave me alone among vast 




View of Tegucigalpa from the top of Picacho 




Repairing the highway from Tegucigalpa to the coast 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 325 

whining pine forests where the air was already chill. 
In the dusk, however, I came upon the hut of Pablo 
Morales and bespoke posada. He growled a surly 
permission and addressed hardly a word to me for 
hours thereafter. The place was the most filthy, 
quarrelsome, pig and chicken overrun stop on the 
trip, and when at last I prepared to swing my ham- 
mock inside the hut the sulky host informed me that 
he only permitted travelers the corredor. Two other 
guests — ragged, soil-encrusted arrieros — were al- 
ready housed within, but there were at least some ad- 
vantages in swinging my own net outside from the 
rafters of the eaves. Pigs jolted against me now and 
then and before I had entirely fallen asleep I was dis- 
turbed by a procession of dirty urchins, each carry- 
ing a blazing pine stick, who came one by one to look 
me over. I was just settling down again when Pablo 
himself appeared, an uncanny figure in the dancing 
light of his flaming torch. He had heard that I 
could " put people on paper," and would I put his 
wife on paper in return for his kindness in giving me 
posada? Yes, in the morning. Why couldn't I do 
it now? He seemed strangely eager, for a man ac- 
customed to set manana as his own time of action. 
His surly indifference had changed to an annoying 
solicitude, and he forced upon me first a steaming 
tortilla, then a native beverage, and finally came with 
a large cloth hammock in which I passed the night 
more comfortably than in my own open-work net. 



326 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

In the morning heavy mountain clouds and a 
swirling mist made photography impossible, but my 
host was not of the grade of intelligence that made 
this simple explanation possible. He led the way 
into the windowless hut, in a corner of which lay a 
woman of perhaps thirty in a dog-litter of a bed en- 
closed by curtains hung from the rafters. The walls 
were black with coagulated smoke. The woman, 
yellow and emaciated with months of fever, groaned 
distressingly as the curtains were drawn aside, but 
her solicitous husband insisted on propping her up in 
bed and holding her with an arm about the shoulders 
while I " put them both on paper." His purpose, it 
turned out, was to send the picture to the shrine of 
" la Virgen de los Remedios " that she might cure the 
groaning wife of her ailment, and he insisted that it 
must show " bed and all and the color of her face " 
that the Virgin might know what was required of her. 
I went through the motions of taking a photograph 
and explained as well as was possible why it could not 
be delivered at once, with the added information to 
soften his coming disappointment that the machine 
sometimes failed. The fellow merely gathered the 
notion that. I was but a sorry magician at best, who 
had my diabolical hocuspocus only imperfectly under 
control, and he did not entirely succeed in keeping 
his sneers invisible. I offered quinine and such other 
medicines as were to be found in my traveling case, 
but he had no faith in worldly remedies. 







A family of Honduras 




Approaching Sabana Grande, the first night's stop on the tramp to 

the coast 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 329 

By nine the day was brilliant. There was an un- 
usual amount of level grassy trail, though steep 
slopes were not lacking. During the morning I 
passed several bands of ragged soldiers meandering 
northward in rout order and some distance behind 
them their bedraggled women and children, all afoot 
and carrying their entire possessions on their heads 
and backs. Frequently a little wooden cross or a 
heap of stones showed where some traveler had fallen 
by the wayside, perhaps at the hands of his fellow- 
man ; for the murder rate, thanks largely to drink 
and vendettas, is high in Honduras. It might be less 
if assassins faced the death penalty, instead of being 
merely shut within prisons from which an active man 
could soon dig his way to freedom with a pocket- 
knife, if he did not have the patience to wait a few 
months until a new revolution brought him release 
or pardon. 

The futility of Honduranean life was illustrated 
here and there. On some vast hillside capable of pro- 
ducing food for a multitude the eye made out a single 
milpa, or tiny corn-field, fenced off with huge slabs 
of mahogany worth easily ten times all the corn the 
patch could produce in a lifetime — or rather, worth 
nothing whatever, for a thing is valuable only where 
it is in demand. At ten I lost the way, found it 
again, and began an endless, rock-strewn climb up- 
ward through pines, tacking more times than I could 
count, each leg of the ascent a toilsome journey in 



330 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

itself. Not the least painful of road experiences in 
Honduras is to reach the summit of such a range 
after hours of heavy labor, to take perhaps a dozen 
steps along the top of the ridge, and then find the 
trail pitching headlong down again into a bottomless 
gorge, from which comes up the joyous sound of a 
mountain stream that draws the thirsty traveler on 
at double speed, only to bring him at last to a rude 
bridge over a precipitous, rock-sided river impossible 
to reach before attacking the next slope staring him 
in the face. 

Luckily I foraged an imitation dinner in San Juan, 
a scattering of mud huts on a broad upland plain, 
most of the adult inhabitants of which were away 
at some work or play in the surrounding hills. 
Cattle without number dotted the patches of unlevel 
meadows, but not a drop of milk was to be had. 
Roosters would have made the night a torture, yet 
three eggs rewarded the canvassing of the entire 
hamlet. These it is always the Honduranean cus- 
tom to puncture with a small hole before dropping 
into hot water, no doubt because there was no other 
way of getting the universal uncleanliness into them. 
Nor did I ever succeed in getting them more than 
half cooked. Once I offered an old woman an extra 
real if she would boil them a full three minutes with- 
out puncturing them. She asserted that without a 
hole in the end " the water could not get in to cook 
them," but at length solemnly promised to follow my 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 331 

orders implicitly. When the eggs reappeared they 
were as raw as ever, though somewhat warm, and each 
had its little punctured hole. I took the cook to task 
and she assured me vociferously that " they broke 
themselves." Apparently there was some supersti- 
tion connected with the matter which none dared 
violate. At any rate I never succeeded in being 
served un-holed eggs in all rural Honduras. 

Not only have these people of the wilderness next 
to nothing to eat, but they are too indolent to learn 
to cook what they have. The thick, doughy tor- 
tillas and half-boiled black beans, accompanied by 
black, unstrained coffee with dirty crude sugar and 
without milk, were not merely monotonous, but 
would have been fatal to civilized man of sedentary 
habits. Only the constant toil and sweat, and the 
clear water of mountain stream offset somewhat the 
evil effects under which even a horseman would prob- 
ably have succumbed. The inhabitants of the Hon- 
duranean wilds are distinctly less human in their 
habits than the wild men of the Malay Peninsula. 
For the latter at least build floors of split bamboo 
above the ground. Without exaggeration the peo- 
ple of this region were more uncleanly than their 
gaunt and yellow curs, for the latter carefully picked 
a spot to lie in while the human beings threw them- 
selves down anywhere and nonchalantly motioned to 
a guest to sit down or drop his bundle among fresh 
offal. They literally never washed, except by acci- 



332 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

dent, and handled food and filth alternately with a 
child-like blandness. 

I was just preparing to leave San Juan when a 
woman came from a neighboring hut to request 
my assistance at a child-birth! In this region all 
" gringoes " have the reputation of being physicians, 
and the inhabitants will not be undeceived. I forci- 
bly tore myself away and struck for the surrounding 
wilderness. 

From soon after noon until sunset I climbed in- 
cessantly among tumbled rocks without seeing a 
human being. A cold wind howled through a vast 
pine forest of the highest altitude of my Hon- 
duranean journey — more than six thousand feet 
above sea-level. Night fell in wild solitude, but I 
could only plod on, for to sleep out at this height 
would have been dangerous. Luckily a corner of 
moon lighted up weirdly a moderately wide trail. I 
had tramped an hour or more into the night when a 
flickering light ahead among the trees showed what 
might have been a camp of bandits, but which proved 
to be only that of a group of muleteers, who had 
stacked their bales of merchandise around three sides 
under an ancient roof on poles and rolled up in their 
blankets close to the blazing wood fire they had built 
to the leeward of it. 

They gave no sign of offering me place and I 
marched on into the howling night. Perhaps four 
miles beyond I made out a cluster of habitations 




A beef just butchered and hung out in the sun 




A dwelling on the hot lands of the coast, and its scantily clad in- 
habitants 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 335 

pitched on the summit and slope of a hill leaning 
toward the trail with nothing above it on any side 
to break the raging wind. An uproar of barking 
dogs greeted my arrival, and it was some time before 
an inmate of one of the dark and silent huts sum- 
moned up courage to peer out upon me. He emerged 
armed with a huge stick and led the way to a miser- 
able hovel on the hilltop, where he beat on the door 
and called out that an " hombrecito " sought posada. 
This opened at last and I entered a mud room in one 
end of which a fire of sticks blazed fitfully. A woman 
of perhaps forty, though appearing much older, as 
is the case with most women of Honduras, lay on a 
wooden bed and a girl of ten huddled among rags 
near the fire. I asked for food and the woman or- 
dered the girl to heat me black coffee and tortillas. 
The child was naked to the waist, though the bitter 
cold wind howled with force through the hut, the 
walls and especially the gables and roof of which were 
far from whole. The woman complained of great 
pain in her right leg, and knowing she would other- 
wise groan and howl the night through in the hope 
of attracting the Virgin's attention, I induced her to 
swallow two sedative pills. The smoke made me weep 
as I swung my hammock from two soot-blackened 
rafters, but the fire soon went out and I awoke from 
the first doze shivering until the hut shook. The 
temperature was not low compared with our northern 
winters, but the wind carried a penetrating chill that 



336 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

reached the marrow of the bones. I rose and tried 
unsuccessfully to relight the fire. The half-naked 
girl proved more skilful and I sat huddled on a stool 
over the fire, alternately weeping with the smoke and 
all but falling into the blaze as I dozed. The pills 
had little effect on my hostess. I gave her three 
more, but her Honduranean stomach was evidently 
zinc-lined and she groaned and moaned incessantly. 
I returned to my hammock and spent several dream- 
months at the North Pole before I was awakened at 
first cockcrow by the old woman kneeling on the 
earth floor before a lithograph of the Virgin sur- 
rounded by withered pine branches, wailing a sing- 
song prayer. She left off at length with the informa- 
tion that her only hope of relief was to make a 
pilgrimage to the " Virgen de los Remedios," and or- 
dered the girl to prepare coffee. I paid my bill of 
two reales and gave the girl one for herself, evidently 
the largest sum she had ever possessed, if indeed she 
remained long in possession of it after I took my 
hobbling and shivering departure. 

A cold and wind-swept hour, all stiffly up or down, 
brought me to Esperanza, near which I saw the first 
wheeled vehicle of Honduras, a contraption of solid 
wooden wheels behind gaunt little oxen identical with 
those of northwest Spain even to the excruciating 
scream of its greaseless axle. In the outskirts two 
ragged, hoof-footed soldiers sprang up from behind 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 339 

the bushes of a hillside and came down upon me, 
waving their muskets and screaming: 

"A'onde va? D'onde viene? Have you a pass 
to go through our department? " 

" Yes, from your consul in Guatemala." 
They did not ask to read it, perhaps for a reason, 
but permitted me to pass ; to my relief, for the old 
woman had announced that smallpox was raging in 
her town of Yamaranguila and its people were not 
allowed to enter Esperanza. This proved to be a 
place of considerable size, of large huts scattered 
over a broad grassy plain in a sheltered valley, with 
perhaps five thousand inhabitants but not a touch of 
civilization. Crowds of boys and dirty ragged 
soldiers followed me, grinning and throwing salacious 
comments as I wandered from house to house try- 
ing to buy food. At a corner of the plaza the co- 
mandante called to me from his hut. I treated him 
with the haughty air of a superior, with frequent 
reference to my " orders from the government," and 
he quickly subsided from patronizing insolence to 
humility and sent a soldier to lead me to " where food 
is prepared for strangers." Two ancient crones, 
pottering about a mud stove in an open-work reed 
kitchen through which the mountain wind swept chill- 
ingly, half-cooked an enormous slab of veal, boiled 
a pot of the ubiquitous black coffee, and scraped to- 
gether a bit of stale bread, or more exactly cake, 



340 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

for pan dulce was the only species that the town 
afforded. A dish of tomatoes of the size of small 
cherries proved far more appetizing, after they had 
been well washed, but the astonishment with which 
the aged pair watched me eat them suggested that the 
tradition that held this fruit poison still reigns in 
Esperanza. 

Back once more in the comandancia I resolved to 
repay the soldiers scattered about town for their 
insolence in the one way painful to the Honduranean 
— by making them exert themselves. Displaying 
again my " government order," I demanded a photo- 
graph of the garrison of Esperanza with the 
comandante, its generals, colonels, lieutenants, and 
all the lesser fry at the head ; and an imperative com- 
mand soon brought the entire force of fifty or more 
hurrying barefoot and startled, their ancient muskets 
under their arms, from the four somnolent corners 
of the city. I kept them maneuvering a half-hour or 
so, ostensibly for photographic reasons, while all the 
populace looked on, and the reos, or department pris- 
oners in their chains, formed a languid group lean- 
ing on their shovels at the edge of the plaza waiting 
until their guards should be returned to them. 

At ten I reshouldered my stuff and marched out 
in a still cold, cloudy, upland day, the wondering in- 
habitants of Esperanza staring awe-stricken after me 
until I disappeared from view. A few miles out I 
met two pure Indians, carrying oranges in nets on 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 34*1 

their backs, the supporting strap across their fore- 
heads. To my question they admitted the fruit was 
for sale, though it is by no means uncommon in 
Central America for countrymen to refuse to sell 
on the road produce they are carrying to town for 
that purpose. I asked for a real's worth. Luckily 
they misunderstood, for the price was " two hands 
for a medio," and as it was I had to leave lying on the 
grass several of the ten fine large oranges one of the 
aborigines had counted on his fingers and accepted 
a two-and-a-half cent piece for with a " Muchas 
gracias, amigo." Farther on I met scores of these 
short, thick-set Indians, of both sexes and all ages, 
straining along over mountain trails for forty or fifty 
miles from their colonies to town each with at most 
a hundred and fifty oranges they would there 
scarcely sell for so high a price. 

Beyond a fordable, ice-cold stream a fairly good 
road changed to an atrocious mountain trail in a 
labyrinth of tumbled pine-clad ridges and gullies, 
on which I soon lost my way in a drizzling rain. The 
single telegraph wire came to my rescue, jumping 
lightly from moss-grown stick to tall slender tree- 
trunk across vast chasms down into and out of which 
I had to slip and slide and stumble pantingly upward 
in pursuit. Before dark I was delighted to fall upon 
a trail again, though not with its condition, for it 
was generally perpendicular and always thick with 
loose stones. A band of arrieros cooking their 



342 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

scanty supper under a shelter tent asserted there 
were houses some two leagues on, but for hours I 
hobbled over mountains of pure stone, my maltreated 
feet wincing at every step, without verifying the 
assertion. Often the descents were so steep I had to 
pick each footstep carefully in the darkness, and 
more than one climb required the assistance of my 
hands. A swift stream all but swept me off my feet, 
and in the stony climb beyond I lost both trail and 
telegraph wire and, after floundering about for some 
time in a swamp, was forced to halt and swing my 
hammock between two saplings under enormous sheer 
cliffs that looked like great medieval castles in the 
night, their white faces spotted by the trees that 
found foothold on them. Happily I had dropped 
well down out of the clouds that hover about Esper- 
anza and the cold mountain wind was now much tem- 
pered. The white mountain wall rising sheer from 
my very hips was also somewhat sheltering, though 
it was easy to dream of rocks being dropped from 
aloft upon me. 

I had clambered a steep and rocky three hours 
next morning before I came upon the first evidences 
of humanity, a hut on a little tableland, with all the 
customary appurtenances and uncleanliness. Black 
unstrained coffee and tortillas of yellow hue grad- 
ually put strength enough to my legs to enable them 
to push me on through bottomless rocky barrancas, 
and at length, beyond the hamlet of Santa Maria, 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 343 

up one of the highest climbs of the trip to the long 
crest of a ridge thick with whispering pines and with 
splendid views of the " Great Depths," dense in wood- 
land, on either side as far as the eye could reach. 
Muleteers passed frequently, often carrying on their 
own backs a bundle of the Santa Rosa cigars with 
which their animals were laden. Except for her 
soldiers, accustomed to " show off " before their fel- 
lows, every person I had met in Honduras had been 
kindly and courteous — if dirty — and never with 
a hint of coveting my meager hoard. Beggars seemed 
as unknown as robbers — perhaps from lack of in- 
itiative and energy. From Esperanza on, the Indian 
boys I met driving mules or carrying nets of oranges 
all folded their hands before them like a Buddhist 
at prayer when they approached me, but instead of 
mumbling some request for alms, as I expected, they 
greeted me with an almost obsequious " Adios " and 
a faint smile. How the " little red schoolhouse " is 
lacking in this wooded mountainland ! Not merely 
was the immense majority entirely illiterate, but very 
few of them had even reached the stage of desiring 
to learn. A paucity of intelligence and initiative 
made all intercourse monotonously the same. The 
greeting was never a hearty, individual phrase of the 
speaker's own choosing, but always the invariable 
" Adios, Buenos dias, tardes or noche," even though 
I had already addressed some inquiry to them. Re- 
plies to questions of distance were as stereotyped, 



3M TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

with the diminutive ito beloved of the Central Ameri- 
cans tacked on wherever possible : 

" Larguita 'sta I A la vueltita no mas ! Esta 
cerquita! De dia no llega! A la tardecita llega. 
Ay no masito ! A la oracioncita llega — " 

Nothing could bring them down from these glit- 
tering generalities to a definite statement of distance, 
in leagues or hours, and to reach a place reported 
" Just around the little corner " was as apt to mean 
a half day's tramp as that it was over the next knoll. 

In the aldea of Tutule I fell in with Alberto Suaza, 
a pleasant appearing, all but white Honduranean, 
who had once been in the army and was now returning 
on horseback from some government errand. The 
hamlet slumbered on a slope of a little leaning valley 
backed by a wooded mountain ridge, all but a few 
of the inhabitants being engaged in coffee culture in 
the communal tract up over the hill when we arrived. 
Suaza picketed his diminutive animal before the hut 
of a friend, in which we shared two eggs and coffee 
and turned in together. Unfortunately I let my 
companion persuade me against my better judgment 
to lay aside my hammock and sleep on his " bed," a 
sun-dried ox-hide thrown on the earth floor, on my 
side of which, " because he was more used to hard 
beds than those senores gringoes," he spread most 
of the colchdn (mattress) — which consisted of two 
empty grainsacks. Either these or the painfully 
thin blanket over us housed a nimble breed I had 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 345 

miraculously escaped thus far on the journey, rob- 
bing me of the much-needed sleep the incessant bark- 
ing of a myriad of dogs, the itching of mosquito bites, 
the rhinoceros-like throat-noises of the family, and 
the rock hardness of the floor would probably other- 
wise have pilfered. The man of the house had 
stripped stark naked and, wrapping a red blanket 
about him, lay down on a bare wooden bed to pass 
the night apparently in perfect comfort. Soft mor- 
tals indeed are we of civilized and upholstered lands. 

Suaza made no protest when I paid the bill for 
both, and by seven we were off, he riding his tiny 
horse until we were out of sight of the town, then 
dismounting to lead it the rest of the day. He had 
announced himself the possessor of an immensely 
rich aunt on whose hacienda we should stop for 
" breakfast," and promised we should spend the night 
either in the gold mine of which she was a chief stock- 
holder or at her home in La Paz, which I gathered to 
be a great mansion filled with all the gleanings of that 
lady's many trips to Europe and the States. I had 
long since learned the Latin American's love of per- 
sonal exaggeration. But Suaza was above the Hon- 
duranean average; he not only read with compara- 
tive ease but cleaned his finger nails, and I looked for- 
ward with some eagerness to a coming oasis of civ- 
ilization in the hitherto unsoftened wilderness. 

It was an ideal day for tramping, cloudy yet 
bright, with a strong fresh wind almost too cold 



346 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

for sitting still and across a country green and fra- 
grant with endless forest, and after the climb back 
of Tutule little more than rolling. It was noon be- 
fore we came upon the new mud-and-tiled house of 
the cattle-tender of " dear aunty's " hacienda, and 
though the meal we enjoyed there was savory by 
Honduranean standards, it was not so completely 
Parisian as I had permitted myself to anticipate. 
That I was allowed to pay for it proved nothing, 
for the employees of the wealthy frequently show no 
aversion to accepting personal favors. 

Not far beyond we came out on the edge of a 
tableland with a splendid view of the valley of 
Comayagua, far below, almost dead level, some ten 
miles wide and thirty long, deep green everywhere, 
with cloud shadows giving beautiful color effects 
across it in the jumble of green mountains with 
the purple tinge of distance beyond which lay 
Tegucigalpa. At the same time there began the 
most laborious descent of the journey, an utterly dry 
mountain face pitched at an acute angle and made 
up completely of loose rock, down which we must 
pick every step and often use our hands to keep from 
landing with broken bones at the bottom. The new 
buildings of the mine were in plain sight almost 
directly below us from the beginning, yet we were 
a full two hours in zigzagging by short legs straight 
down the loose-stone slope to them. The American 








The mozo pauses for a drink on the trail 







One way of transporting merchandise from the coast to Tegucigalpa 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 349 

manager was absent, but in the general store of the 
company I had not only the pleasure of spending an 
hour in the first thoroughly clean building I had seen 
in Honduras, but of speaking English, for the two 
Negro youths in charge of the place were natives of 
Belize, or British Honduras, and were equally fluent 
in my own tongue or Spanish, while their superiority 
in personal condition over the natives was a sad com- 
mentary on the boasted advantage of the republican 
form of government. 

The thirsty, rock-sown descent continued, bring- 
ing us at last with aching thighs to the level of the 
vast valley, more than four thousand feet below the 
lodging-places of the few days past. Suaza mounted 
his horse and prepared to enter his native La Paz 
in style. So often had kingly quarters promised me 
by the self-styled sons of wealth in Latin America 
gradually degenerated to the monotonous tortilla 
level of general conditions that I had not been able 
entirely to disabuse myself of an expectation of dis- 
appointment. Such enough, where the trail broke 
up into a score of paths among mud huts and pig 
wallows, my companion paused in the dark to say : 

" Perhaps after all it will be better to take you 
right to my house for to-night. One always feels 
freer in one's father's house. My aunt might be 
holding some social affair, or be sick or — But we 
will surely call at her mansion to-morrow, and — " 



350 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

" Como usted quiera ? " I answered, swallowing my 
disappointment. At least his father's house should 
be something above the ordinary. 

But to my astonishment we stopped a bit farther 
on in the suburbs before one of the most miserable 
mud hovels it had been my misfortune to run across 
in Honduras, swarming with pigs, yellow curs, and 
all the multitudinous filth and disarray indigenous 
to the country. The coldest of welcomes greeted 
us, the frowsy, white-bearded father in the noisome 
doorway replying to the son's query of why there 
was no light with a crabbed : 

" If you want light why don't you come in the day- 
time?" 

My companion told a boy of the family to go buy 
a candle, and his scrawny, unkempt mother bounded 
out of the hut with the snarl of a miser : 

" What do you want a candle for ? " 

The boy refused to go and Suaza tied his horse 
to a bush and went in quest of one himself. I men- 
tioned supper, hinting at my willingness to pay for 
anything that could be furnished, but to each article 
I suggested came the monotonous, indifferent Hon- 
duranean answer, " No hay." After much growling 
and an extended quarrel with her son, the woman 
set on a corner of a wabbly-legged table, littered with 
all manner of unsavory junk, two raw eggs, punc- 
tured and warmed, a bowl of hot water and a stale 
slab of pan dulce, a cross between poor bread and 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 351 

worse cake. I wandered on into the town in the 
hope of finding some imitation of a hotel. But 
though the place had a population of several thou- 
sand, it was made up exclusively of mud huts only 
two or three of which were faintly lighted by pine- 
splinters. The central plaza was a barren, un- 
lighted pasture, a hut on the corner of which was re- 
puted to be a shop, but when I had beaten my way 
into it I found nothing for sale except bottles of an 
imitation wine at monopoly prices. In my disgust 
I pounded my way into every hovel that was said to 
be a tienda. Not an edible thing was to be found. 
One woman claimed to have fruit for sale, and after 
collecting a high price for them she went out into 
the patio and picked a half-dozen perfectly green 
oranges. 

"But what do people eat and drink in La Paz? 
Grass and water? " I demanded. 

But the bedraggled population was not even amen- 
able to crude sarcasm, and the only reply I got was 
a lazy, child-like : 

" Oh, each one keeps what he needs to eat in his 
own house." 

Here was a town of a size to have been a place of 
importance in other lands, yet even the mayor lived 
with his pigs on an earth floor. Statistics of popu- 
lation have little meaning in Honduras. The place 
recalled a cynical " gringo's " description of a sim- 
ilar town, " It has a hundred men, two hundred 



352 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

women, and 100,000 chuchos " — the generic term in 
Central America for yellow curs of all colors. Why 
every family houses such a swarm of these miserable 
beasts is hard to guess. Mere apathy, no doubt, for 
they are never fed ; nor, indeed, are the pigs that also 
overrun every household and live, like the dogs, on 
the offal of the patio or backyard that serves as place 
of convenience. They have at least the doubtful 
virtue of partly solving the sewer problem, which is 
not a problem to Honduraneans. A tortilla or other 
food held carelessly is sure to be snatched by some 
cat, pig, or dog; a bundle left unwatched for a mo- 
ment is certain to be rooted about the floor or de- 
posited with filth. These people utterly lack any 
notion of improvement. A child or an animal, for 
instance, climbs upon the table or into a dish of food. 
When the point is reached at which it is unavoidable, 
the person nearest shouts, throws whatever is handy, 
or kicks at the offender ; but though the same iden- 
tical performance is repeated a score of times during 
a single meal, there is never any attempt to correct 
the culprit, to drive it completely off, or remove the 
threatened dish from the danger zone. A people in- 
habiting a land that might be a garden spot of the 
earth drift through their miserable lives in identically 
the same fashion as their gaunt and mangy curs. 

There was a great gathering of the neighboring 
cleans in the Suaza hut next morning, while my com- 
panion of the day before enlarged upon what he 







The other way of bringing goods up to the capital 




The garrison of Amapala 



UPS AND DOWNS OF HONDURAS 355 

fancied he knew about his distinguished guest. 
Among those who crowded the place were several men 
of education, in the Honduranean sense, — about 
equal to that of a poorly trained American child in 
the fourth grade. But there was not one of them that 
did not show a monkey curiosity and irresponsibility 
in handling every article in my pack ; my sweater — 
" Ay que lindo ! " my papers — " How beautiful ! " 
an extremely ordinary shirt — " How soft and fine ! 
How costly!" and "How much did this cost? — 
and that?" Suaza displayed my medicine-case to 
the open-mouthed throng — and would I give mother 
some pills for her colic, and would I please photo- 
graph each one of the family — and so on to the end 
of patience. There was no mention made of the 
wealthy aunt and her mansion after the day dawned. 
The invitation to spend a few days, " as many as you 
like," amid the luxuries of Paris and the Seven Seas 
had tapered down to the warmed eggs and black 
coffee, the only real food I ate being that I had 
bought in a house-to-house canvass in the morning. 
I had distributed pills to most of the family and sev- 
eral neighbors and photographed them, at the request 
of the man of many promises, had paid his bills on 
the road since our meeting; while I prepared my 
pack, he requested me to send him six prints each of 
the pictures, some postals of New York, a pair of 
pajamas such as I carried, " and any other little 
things I might think he would like," including long 



356 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

weekly letters, and as I rose to take my leave and 
asked what I owed him, he replied with a bland and 
magnanimous smile: 

" You owe me nothing whatever, senor, — only to 
mama," and dear mama collected about what a first- 
class hotel would have for the same length of time. 



CHAPTER X 

THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 

A MONOTONOUS wide path full of loose stones 
led through dry, breathless jungle across the 
valley floor to Comayagua. The former capital of 
the republic had long held a place in my imagination, 
and the distant view of it the day before from the 
lofty rim of the valley backed by long blue ranges 
of mountains had enhanced my desire to visit the 
place, even though it lay somewhat off the direct 
route. But romance did not long survive my en- 
trance. For the most part it was merely a larger 
collection of huts along badly cobbled or grass- 
grown streets common to all " cities " of Honduras. 
A stub-towered, white-washed cathedral, built by the 
Spaniards and still the main religious edifice of Hon- 
duras, faced the drowsy plaza ; near it were a few 
" houses of commerce," one-story plaster buildings 
before which hung a sign with the owner's name and 
possibly some hint of his business, generally that of 
hawking a few bolts of cloth, straw hats, or ancient 
and fly-specked cheap products from foreign parts. 
The town boasted a place that openly receives trav- 
elers, but its two canvas cots and its rafters were al- 

357 



358 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

ready occupied by several snobbish and gawkily 
dressed young natives bound from the north coast 
to the capital. 

The chief of telegraphs finally led me to the new 
billard-hall, where a lawyer in a frock coat and the 
manners of a prime minister admitted he had an 
empty shop in which I could swing my hammock. 
When he had finished his game, he got a massive key 
and aS candle and led the way in person to a small 
hut in a side street, the rafters uncomfortably high 
above the tile floor, on which' I was fortunate to have 
a newspaper to spread before depositing my bundle. 
The lawyer took leave of me with the customary 
" At your orders ; here you are in your own house," 
and marched ministerially away with the several 
pompous friends who had accompanied him. But a 
few moments later, having shaken them off, he re- 
turned to collect ten cents — one real for rent and 
another for the candle. It was the first lodging I 
had paid since leaving Guatemala City. As I 
doubled up in my ill-hung hammock, the dull thump 
of a distant guitar and the explosion of a rare fire- 
cracker broke the stillness of New Year's eve, while 
now and then there drifted to my ears the sound of 
a band in the main plaza that tortured the night 
at intervals into the small hours. 

Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly 
barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily 
dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored 




Marooned "gringoes" waiting with what patience possible at the 
"Hotel Morazan," Amapala 




Unloading cattle in the harbor of Amapala 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 361 

huts. The place had the familiar Central-American 
air of trying to live with the least possible exertion ; 
its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut 
from black to near-white. There were none of the 
fine physical specimens common to the highlands of 
Mexico, and the teeth were notably bad. A few of 
the soldiers, in blue-jean uniforms with what had 
once been white stripes, faded straw hats, and bare 
feet, were mountain Indians with well-developed 
chests ; for military service — of the catch-them-with- 
a-rope variety — is compulsory in Honduras. But 
the population in general was anemic and stunted. 
Two prisoners were at work in the streets ; more 
properly they sat smoking cigarettes and putting a 
finger cautiously to their lips when I passed in silent 
request not to wake up their guard, who was sound 
asleep on his back in the shade, his musket lying 
across his chest. The town had one policeman, a 
kinky-haired youth in a white cap and a pale light 
gray cotton uniform, who carried a black club and 
wore shoes ! The cartero, or mailman, was a bare- 
foot boy in faded khaki and an ancient straw hat, 
who wandered lazily and apparently aimlessly about 
town with the week's correspondence in hand, read- 
ing the postals and feeling the contents of each letter 
with a proprietary air. The sun was brilliant and 
hot here in the valley, and there was an aridity that 
had not been suggested in the view of it from the 
heights above. 



362 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

It was no place to spend New Year's, however, stiff 
and sore though I was from the hardships of the 
road, and toward lazy, silent noonday I wandered 
on along the trail to the modern capital, hoping 
that it, at least, might have real beds and a hotel, and 
perhaps even white inhabitants. The battered old 
church bells were thumping as I topped the slight 
rise that hid the town from view, and it was four 
hours later that I saw or heard the next human 
being, or any other evidence of his existence except 
a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire 
sagging from one crooked stick to another. The 
four stony dry but flat leagues along the valley 
floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the popula- 
tion of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New 
Year's, as they would celebrate any other possible 
excuse not to work. Here I obtained water, and 
new directions that led me off more toward the east 
and the heaped-up mountains that lay between me 
and Tegucigalpa. On all sides spread a dry, bushy 
land, aching for cultivation. I had the good fortune 
to fall in with a river so large I was able to swim 
three strokes in one of its pools, and strolled with 
dusk into the town of Flores on the edge of the first 
foothills of the ranges still to be surmounted. 

Though still a lazy naked village, this one showed 
some hint of the far-off approach of civilization. 
Animals were forbidden the house in which I passed 
the night, and its tile-floor was almost clean. This 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 363 

latter virtue was doubly pleasing, for the rafters 
above were so high that even when I had tied my 
hammock by the very ends of the ropes I could 
only climb in by mounting a chair and swinging 
myself up as into a trapeze; and if I must break a 
leg it would be some slight compensation to do so on 
a clean floor. How much uncleanliness this simple 
little 30-cent net had kept me up out of since the 
day I bought it in Guatemala City ! 

Like many of the tasks of life, this one grew easier 
toward its termination. A moderate day's walk, not 
without rocky climbs and bajadas, but with consider- 
able stretches of almost level going across solitary 
wind-cooled plains, brought me to Tamara. A pass- 
ing company of soldiers had all but gutted the vil- 
lage larder, but at dusk in the last hut I got not 
only food but meat, and permission to swing my ham- 
mock from the blackened rafters of the reed kitchen, 
over the open pots and pans. Incidentally, for the 
first time in Honduras prices were quadrupled in 
honor of my being a foreigner. Civilization indeed 
was approaching. 

Half way up the wooded ridge beyond I met the sun 
mounting from the other side, fell in soon after with a 
real highway, and at eleven caught the first sight 
of Tegucigalpa, the " City of the Silver Hills," capi- 
tal of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of 
Honduras. It was no very astounding sight ; merely 
what in other lands would have been considered a 



364 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

large village, a chiefly one-story place with a white- 
washed church, filling only a small proportion of a 
somewhat barren valley surrounded by high rocky 
and partly wooded hills. I marched down through 
Comayagiiela in all the disreputableness of fifteen 
days on the trail, across the little bridge of a few 
arches over a shallow river which to Honduraneans 
far and wide is one of the greatest works of man, and 
into the park-like little central plaza, with its arbor 
of huge purple bourgainvillea. 

The " Hotel Jockey Club " was not all that the 
imagination might have pictured, but at least there 
was the satisfaction of knowing that any stranger 
in town, be he "gringo " or president-elect, famous 
or infamous, rich or honest, could stop nowhere else. 
Among its luxuries was a " bath," which turned out 
to be a massive stone vessel in the basement with a 
drizzle of cold water from a faucet above that was 
sure to run dry about the time the victim was well 
soaped; its frontiersman rooms were furnished with 
little more than weak-kneed canvas cots, and the bare- 
foot service of the dining-room was assisted by all 
the dogs, fowls, and flies of the region. But there 
lay two hungry weeks of Central American trail 
behind me and for days to come I ate unquestioningly 
anything that came within reach of my fingers, of 
whatever race, color, or previous condition of servi- 
tude. 

Just around the corner — as everything is in this 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 365 

miniature capital — the American Legation delivered 
the accumulated mail of a month, and the pair of real 
shoes I had had the happy thought of sending to my- 
self here months before. This bit of foresight saved 
me from hobbling on to the coast barefoot. I had 
arrived just in time to attend one of Tegucigalpa's 
gala events, the inspection of her newly reformed 
police force. " It is set for three," said the legation 
secretary, " so come around about three-thirty." 
Just around another corner we entered toward four 
the large dusty patio of a one-story building of mud 
blocks, against the adobe wall of which were lined 
up something over a hundred half-frightened, half- 
proud Honduranean Indians in brand new, dark -blue 
uniforms and caps, made in Germany, and armed with 
black night-sticks and large revolvers half-hidden in 
immense holsters. We took the places of honor re- 
served for us at a bench and table under the patio 
veranda beside the chief of police, an American 
soldier of fortune named Lee Christmas. He was a 
man nearing fifty, totally devoid of all the embroidery 
of life, golden toothed and graying at the temples, 
but still hardy and of youthful vigor, of the dress 
and manner of a well-paid American mechanic, who 
sat chewing his black cigar as complacently as if he 
were still at his throttle on the railroad of Guatemala. 
Following the latest revolution he had reorganized 
what, to use his own words, had been " a bunch of 
barefooted apes in faded-blue cotton rags " into the 



366 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

solemn military company that was now to suffer its 
first formal inspection. The native secretary, stand- 
ing a bit tremulously in the edge of the shade, called 
from the list in his hand first the name of Christmas 
himself, then that of the first assistant, and his own, 
he himself answering " present " for each of these. 
Next were the commanders, clerks, under-secretaries, 
and the like in civilian garb, each, as his name was 
pronounced, marching past us hat in hand and bow- 
ing profoundly. Last came the policemen in uni- 
form. As the secretary read his title and first name, 
each self-conscious Indian stepped stiffly forth from 
the ranks, throwing a foot, heavy with the unac- 
customed shoe, high in the air and pounding the earth 
in the new military style taught him by a willowy 
young native in civilian dress who leaned haughtily 
on his cane watching every movement, made a sharp- 
cornered journey about the sun-flooded yard and 
bringing up more or less in front of his dreaded 
chief, gave a half turn, raised the right leg to the 
horizontal with the grace of an aged ballet dancer 
long since the victim of rheumatism, brought it down 
against the left like the closing of a heavy trap- 
door, saluted with his night-stick and huskily called 
out his own last name, which Christmas checked off 
on the list before him without breaking the thread of 
the particular anecdote with which he chanced at 
that moment to be entertaining us. 

" I tried to get 'em to cut out this Ger- 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 367 

man monkey business of throwing their feet around," 
confided the chief sadly, " but it 's no use, for it 's 
in the military manual." 

Judged by Central-American standards the force 
was well trained. But the poor Indians and half- 
breeds that made up its bulk were so overwhelmed 
with the solemnity of the extraordinary occasion that 
they were even more ox-like in their clumsiness and 
nearer frightened apes in demeanor than in their 
native jungles. The quaking fear of making a mis- 
step caused them to keep their eyes riveted on the 
lips of our compatriot, from which, instead of the 
words of wrath they no doubt often imagined, issued 
some such remark as: 

" Why it, W , one of the bums I 

picked up along the line one day in Guatemala told 
me the best yarn that — " 

Nor could they guess that the final verdict on the 
great ceremony that rang forth on the awe-struck 
silence as the chief rose to his feet was : 

" Well, drop around to my room in the hotel when 
you want to hear the rest of it. But if you see the 
sign on my door, ' Ladies Only To-day,' don't knock. 
The chambermaid may not have finished her official 
visit." 

The climate of Tegucigalpa leaves little to be de- 
sired. Otherwise it is merely a large Central-Ameri- 
can village of a few thousand inhabitants, with much 
of the indifference, uncleanliness, and ignorance of 



368 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

the rest of the republic. Priests are numerous, 
wandering about smoking their cigarettes and pro- 
tected from the not particularly hot sun by broad 
hats and umbrellas. One lonely little native sheet 
masquerades as a newspaper, the languid little shops, 
often owned by foreigners, offer a meager and 
ancient stock chiefly imported and all high in price ; 
for it takes great inducement to make the natives 
produce anything beyond the corn and beans for 
their own requirements. The " national palace " is 
a green, clap-boarded building, housing not only the 
president and his little reception-room solemn with 
a dozen chairs in cotton shrouds, but congress, the 
ministry, and the " West Point of Honduras," the 
superintendent of which was a native youth who had 
spent a year or two at Chapultepec. Against it 
lean barefooted, anemic " soldiers " in misfit overalls, 
armed with musket and bayonet that overtop them 
in height. The main post-ofSce of the republic is 
an ancient adobe hovel, in the cobwebbed recesses of 
which squat a few stupid fellows waiting for the 
mule-back mail-train to arrive that they may lock 
up in preparation for beginning to look over the cor- 
respondence manana. It is not the custom to make 
appointments in Tegucigalpa. If one resident de- 
sires the presence of another at dinner, or some less 
excusable function, he wanders out just before the 
hour set until he picks up his guest somewhere. By 
night the town is doubly dead. The shops put up 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 369 

their wooden shutters at dusk, the more energetic 
inhabitants wander a while about the cobbled streets, 
dim-lighted here and there by arc-lights, the cathe- 
dral bells jangle at intervals like suspended pieces of 
scrap-iron, arousing a chorus of barking dogs, and a 
night in which two blankets are comfortable settles 
down over all the mountainous, moon-flooded region. 
There is not even the imitation of a theater, the plaza 
concert on Sunday evenings, in which the two sexes 
wander past each other in opposite directions for 
an hour or two, being the only fixed recreation. A 
man of infinite patience, or who had grown old and 
weary of doing, might find Tegucigalpa agreeable; 
but it would soon pall on the man still imbued with 
living desires. 

The fitting shield of Honduras would be one bear- 
ing as motto that monotonous phrase which greets 
the traveler most frequently along her trails, " No 
hay." The country is noted chiefly for what " there 
is not." Everywhere one has the impression of 
watching peculiarly stupid children playing at be- 
ing a republic. The nation is a large farm in size 
and a poorly run one in condition. The wave of 
" liberty " that swept over a large part of the world 
after the French Revolution left these wayward and 
not over-bright inhabitants of what might be a rich 
and fertile land to play at governing themselves, to 
ape the forms of real republics, and mix them with 
such childish clauses as come into their infantile 



370 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

minds. The chief newspaper of the republic resem- 
bles a high-school periodical, concocted by particu- 
larly thick-headed students without faculty assistance 
or editing. A history of their childish governmental 
activities would fill volumes. In 1910 all the copper 
one-centavo coins were called in and crudely changed 
to two-centavo pieces by surcharging the figure 2 and 
adding an s, a much smaller one-centavo coin being 
issued. The " government " may have made as much 
as $50 by the transaction. Not long before my ar- 
rival, the current postage-stamps, large quantities of 
which had been bought by foreign firms within the 
country, were suddenly declared worthless, and the 
entire accumulated correspondence for the next 
steamer returned to the senders, instead of at least 
being forwarded to destination under excess charges. 
Foreigners established the first factory Tegucigalpa 
had ever known, which was already employing a half- 
hundred of the pauperous inhabitants in the making 
of candles, when the " government " suddenly not 
only put a heavy duty on stearine but required the 
payment of back duty on all that had already been 
imported. An Englishman came down from the 
mines of San Juancito embued with the desire to 
start a manual-training school in the capital. He 
called on the mulatto president and offered his serv- 
ices free for a year, if the government would invest 
$5000 in equipment. The president told him to come 
back manana. On that elusive day he was informed 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 371 

that the government had no such sum at its dis- 
posal. 

" I have saved up $2500 myself," replied the Eng- 
lishman, " which I will lend the government for the 
purpose, if it will add a like amount." 

But when manana came again, the president ex- 
pressed his regrets that the national treasury could 
not endure such a strain. 

The best view of Tegucigalpa is had from Picacho, 
a long ridge from back in the mountains, ending in a 
blunt nose almost sheer above the city. Whoever 
climbs it recognises the reason for the native saying, 
" He who holds Picacho sleeps in the palace." Its 
town-side face is almost precipitous, and on every 
hand spread rolling, half-bare upland mountains. 
All but sheer below, in the lowest depression of the 
visible world, sits the little capital, rather compact in 
the center, then scattered along the little river and 
in the suburb of Comayagiiela beyond it. The dull- 
red tile roofs predominate, and the city is so directly 
below that one can see almost to the bottom of every 
tree-grown patio. A few buildings are of two stories, 
and the twin-towers of .the little white cathedral 
stand somewhat above the general level. But most 
noticeable of any is the fact that all the vast broken 
plain surrounding it far and wide lies almost entirely 
uncultivated, for the most part neither cleared nor 
inhabited, crossed by several roads and trails, most 
conspicuous of all the two white ribbons by one of 



m% TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

which I had arrived from the north and the other of 
which was already inviting me onward to the coast 
and new climes. 

A fellow-gringo, bound for the Pacific exit on a 
miniature horse, packed away my baggage on his 
cargo mule and left me to walk unhampered. A 
highway some fifty feet wide and white with dust 
struck off uncertainly toward the southwest, a splen- 
did highway once, built for automobiles by the com- 
bined efforts of the government and an American 
mining company farther up in the hills, but now suf- 
fered to fall here and there into a disrepair that made 
it as useless for such traffic as a mountain trail. 
The first day of thirty miles brought us to Sabana 
Grande, with a species of hotel. During the second, 
there were many down-grade short-cuts, full of loose 
stones and dusty dry under the ever warmer sun, 
with the most considerable bridge in Honduras over 
the Pasoreal River, and not a few stiff climbs to make 
footsore my entrance into the village of Pespire. 
Here was a house that frankly and openly displayed 
the sign " Restaurante," in a corner of which travel- 
ers of persuasive manners might be furnished tijeras, 
sissor-legged canvas cots on which to toss out the 
night; for Pespire is far below Tegucigalpa and on 
the edge of the blazing tropics. 

For which reason we rose at three to finish the half- 
day of sea-level country left us. The stars hung 
brilliant and a half moon lighted up a way that was 




The steamer arrives at last that is to carry us south to Panama 




We lose no time in being rowed out to her 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 375 

hot even at this hour. From sunrise on huge lizards 
scurried up among the wayside rocks as we passed, 
and sat torpid, staring at us with their lack-luster 
eyes. Natives wearing spurs on their hoof-like bare 
feet rode by us now and then, and mule-trains or 
screaming wooden carts crawled past on their way 
up to the capital. All traffic between Tegucigalpa 
and the outside world passes either over this route 
or the still longer trail from Puerto Cortez, on the 
north coast, from which a toy railroad limps a few 
miles inland before losing its courage and turning 
back. By daylight the fantastic ranges of the in- 
terior had disappeared and the last low foothill soon 
left us to plod on straight across a dust-dry sandy 
plain with brown withered grass and mesquite bushes, 
among which panted scores of cattle. Honduras 
runs so nearly down to a point on its Pacific side 
that the mountains of both Salvador and Nicaragua 
stood out plainly to the right and left. 

By sweltering ten we were swimming in the Pacific 
before the scattered village of San Lorenzo, though 
there was visible only a little arm of the sea shut in 
by low bushy islands. It was our good fortune not 
to have to charter by telegraph and at the expense 
of a Honduranean fortune means of transportation 
to the island port of Amapala ; for before we could 
seek the shelter of our sun-faded garments a launch 
put in for a party that had been forming for several 
days past. The passengers included a shifty-eyed 



376 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

old priest in charge of two nuns, the rules of whose 
order forbade them to speak to men, and the mozo 
of an influential Honduranean who had shot a man 
the night before and was taking advantage of his 
master's personal friendship with the judge of the 
district. The launch wound between bushy banks 
and came out at last on a rich-blue bay shut off in 
the far distance by several jagged black volcanic 
islands, toward one of which it wheezed a hot and 
monotonous three hours. This was " Tiger's Is- 
land," named evidently from the one moth-eaten 
specimen that had once been landed here by a passing 
circus. At a narrow wooden wharf of this we at 
length gradually tied up. Ragged, barefoot soldiers 
stopped us to write our pedigrees, as if we were en- 
tering some new country, and addressed us in monkey 
signs instead of the Spanish of which experience had 
convinced them all traveling foreigners were ignor- 
ant. 

Amapala is a species of outdoor prison to which 
all travelers to or from Honduras on the Pacific side 
are sentenced for a term varying in length according 
to their luck, which is generally bad. Those who do 
not sleep in the park toss out their imprisonment on 
a bedstead of woven ropes in a truly Honduranean 
building that disguises itself under the name of 
" Hotel Morazan," the slatternly keeper of which 
treats her helpless inmates with the same considera- 
tion as any other prison warden devoid of humanity 



THE CITY OF THE SILVER HILLS 377 

or oversight. The steamer I awaited was due before 
I arrived, but day after day I lay marooned on the 
blazing volcanic rock without a hint as to its where- 
abouts. Not even exercise was possible, unless one 
cared to race up and down the sharp jagged sides 
of the sea-girt volcano. The place ranks high as an 
incubator of malignant fevers and worse ailments, 
and to cap the climax the ice-machine was broken 
down. It always is, if the testimony of generations 
of castaways is to be given credence. Our only 
available pastime was to buy a soap-boxful of 
oysters, at the cost of a quarter, and sit in the nar- 
row strip of shade before the " hotel " languidly 
opening them with the only available corkscrew, our 
weary gaze fixed on the blue arm of water framed by 
the shimmering hot hills of Salvador by which tra- 
dition had it ocean craft sometimes came to the 
rescue. 

But all things have an end, even life imprisonment, 
and with the middle of January we awoke one morn- 
ing to find a steamer anchored in the foreground of 
the picture that had seared itself into our memories. 
All day long half-naked natives waded lazily back 
and forth from the beach to the clumsy tenders, ex- 
changing the meager products of the country for ill- 
packed merchandise from my own. Night settled 
down over their unfinished task, the self-same moon 
came out and the woven-rope cots again creaked and 
groaned under unwilling guests. But by noon next 



378 TRAMPING THROUGH HONDURAS 

day we had swung our hammocks under the awning 
of the forecastlehead and were off along the tropical 
blue Pacific for Panama. 



THE END 



/*«WMpV* 



